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Industrial machine user interface Controller solution

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Nominal Animal:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on June 24, 2023, 11:38:46 pm ---Have never managed to get something operational with this setup in less than about 5 seconds. Whereas with a MCU-based solution, the power-on delay can be nearly instant (a few ms to a few tens of ms.)
--- End quote ---
Yep.  Depending on the hardware, several of those five seconds can be unavoidable; like the BIOS/EFI startup on AMD/Intel that often takes 15-30 seconds to even start booting an OS.

(Having an animated bootsplash, like on old Mac OS showing the icons for the kernel/OS modules and services it starts during bootup, can make that feel much shorter, though.  You can test it on unwitting people too: just don't ask which form of boot is faster, ask which one they prefer.  Something to seriously consider.)

In all cases, I cannot stress enough how much easier systems integration and minimising bootup time is, if you have SSD-class (PCIe/NGFF or SATA) bootable storage.  It is the one thing I personally will not do without, when making gadgety appliances based on Linux SBCs.  If the hardware does not support bootable SSDs, use a minimal bootloader that can boot off USB, and an USB-to-SATA dongle, and a cheap but reliable SSD (Kingston, Western Digital).  Even if you have only USB 2 available, that still makes sense, because of the utterly superior small random read block rates.  Test it in practice, to see for yourself how large a practical difference it makes.

With fast PCIe, or native or USB3-bridged SATA storage, even a $50-class sub-10 watt SBC can feel like a desktop machine when browsing the internet and watching videos and playing retro games.  Just make sure their OpenGL ES implementation is supported in Linux.

(Although, using a wrapper around the browser to keep your browser profile on a tmpfs (ramdisk) –– compressed and stored to permanent storage when last browser instance closes, set up and decompressed from permanent storage when the first browser instance starts –– makes the most of the difference, even on Raspberry Pis running off SD cards.  I started doing that 15 years ago on a Linux minilaptop with a 2.5" spinny-disk drive, in the Acer Aspire One era.)

Simon:
Well we have settled on a SBC, currently we are using Squareline studio/LVGL. So for the sake of testing and learning myself I have a RPi P400 setup with Ubuntu server so no desktop, I can export code from squareline studio but no idea what to do in the middle. As I understand it I need to open it with VS Code and tinker with the code to set it up for the hardward myself. I suppose at this point it's how does one code for Linux, any suggestions on resources welcome.

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