I have been thinking a bit about creating a stand-alone HMI component. Basically a terminal with a touch display and optional keyboard, mouse and customized input equipment. The key principle would be that we use a Ethernet/RSX as bacbone for data traffic, while the HMI takes care of graphics, input etc.
This is just some random GIF I found on the net, but an HMI app could consist of a set of standard components where layout is controlled by XML files that are uploaded from the device. Communication could be Ethernet/RSX. Equiped with a Plain VM this could be an interesting concept where HMI logic is executed on the HMI unit and only events/data transferred to/from the rest of the system.
Making the app above might seem complicated, but it’s nothing I have not done before from scratch in C/C++. I am thinking more and more about creating a standard HMI app in Qt since that can run on Windows, Linux, Android, OsX etc. I need to check around for options.
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Since we are talking about a network of stand-alone units we could create a full control center as well.