A graphic environment for user interfaces in embedded devices

Embedded systems have limited processing and storage capacities, and small screens to display details about their status and statistics on the operations they perform. These systems are used extensively in homes, the service industry and manufacturing industries. In recent years, several proposals and tools have emerged to visually represent the information produced by embedded systems, in order to provide methods to users to make decisions in a timely manner [3]. The development of these systems can use libraries such as DirectFB, Qt-E, and NanoX, and APIs such as OpenGL and DirectX. However, these can be heavy for some devices and consume a lot of resources to display the graphic primitives required by the interfaces. So, C / C ++ is a good alternative as it is very efficient and works at a low level, although it requires a complex set of tools (compilers, debuggers, libraries) to recompile the programs for each architecture, in addition to its high learning curve, because memory management is a difficult task to be performed. As a result, this research work proposes a graphic environment called Diokol, which is based on the OpenVG graphics standard and Lua. This environment is aimed to overcome some of these disadvantages and is targetted to facilitate the implementation of user interfaces for embedded systems.