Simple HMI or User Interface

Is there anything existing, or being worked on in regards to a HMI of some sort? The demo PPMAC board I'm using does not have a VGA card on it, is such a thing going to be available soon? As far as software side, for our [meager] needs we will probably want a graphically built environment with event generating buttons(that have callbacks for things like reading/writing to shared memory), and some sort of message queue to send text and other "event driven" data from our realtime application to update display counters and such. What is the thinking now on the HMI philosophy? Is DT going to provide a GUI builder software tool as part of the IDE, or is the customer in the position of using a gui builder and compiling/downloading it themselves? For me personally I like a simple HMI without alot of graphics and animated widgets with a "cool" factor. I know others may have different opinions, just giving my $0.02 worth.

1. PPmac will have a VGA ability. 2. We will offer a comonent library which has the GUI elements we use to make the IDE (minus the project system) plus GUI-less functions for communications, file manipulation, and all the things the IDE GUI components do. These are all made with the idea that someone will use something like C# to make their HMI with these components and functions. The C# will run on PPmac using teh Mono library. 3. PPmac has a Web Server so some people will decide to make their HMI as a Web application.

Will there be a graphical GUI "builder" like in [generic] visual studio, or will you build the screen in code, presumably using different layout schemes?

We supply no HMI programming environment. You will use whatever you want like VS for example. Our GUI components are .Net components so they will easily integrate to VS.

I assume we will be able to develop our own native code that works with an X server as well (using gtk, qt, etc)? Visual studio and C# are great tools though, so I have no great problem using that as well. Has performance of C# GUI been tested under mono on the Power PMAC?

Yes those environments will work. We have not done extensive performance benchmarking. Officially we are saying the VGA capability is for simple HMI applications. We tested running four control loops, two standard and two commutated with current loop control. Servo was 2.2kHz commutation was 9kHz. The feel we got from the HMI which had position updates an control buttons was similar to the Atom computer (if you are familiar with it). Of course the more the CPU does in other areas the less responsive the CPU will be. Itis hard to quantify.

I am leaning toward using GTK and building the HMI screen directly from C code in a "C application" using the Delta Tau IDE. Is there library support for GTK in the development environment, or would we have to install the GTK libraries into the Power PMAC IDE cross compiler environment? Would we be better off doing this outside of the Power PMAC IDE?

Do this outside the IDE. It will be a long time until we have the ability in the IDE for this type of programming.