Xerxes, just a little more clarification: a collaborative effort on a platform independent UI for this type of application could be a great thing. I would be interested in contributing snips to it if somebody else organized it. But here is what happens in 90% of such efforts:
Participants argue for a long while about which platforms to support and how to make it platform independent. Joe wants to use one GPL'd framework, Jane wants to write the core in Python, Bart said he had something half developed but isn't answering his email any more..... then everybody has their own idea about which communication protocol should be used and what values should be communicated between the board and the PC... that turns out to be dependent on the hardware so a general mechanism has to be agreed on and a fight breaks out about whether to use modbus or xml. Meanwhile Jane lost interest and Joe decides to go off and do his own thing because the group didn't agree with his ideas. Ernie joins the project and has to be brought up to speed. He has his own ideas. Three months have gone by and everybody is waiting for Bart's code that is supposedly almost done.....
That sounds like my job, not something I noodle around with in the evenings for fun!  |