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Lintouch, the opensource HMI

What is Lintouch

Lintouch is an opensource HMI software. It lets you design user interfaces for process automation. Lintouch runs on most popular hardware and software platforms, is lightweight and easily xtensible.

Key Features

  1. Multiplatform

    Lintouch runs on most popular hardware and software platforms including embedded systems such as Motorola PowerPC with Linux and Intel desktops with Microsoft Windows. The portability is only limited by availability of C/C++ compiler and its two major dependencies: Qt Library of Trolltech, and APR (Apache Portable Runtime) Library of Apache Software Foundation.

    Qt is the basic building block of KDE Desktop Environment. APR powers the most popular web server Apache.

  2. Lightweight

    Lintouch has been optimized for small and embedded devices. It utilizes only a little disk space (Server ~ 100kb, Runtime ~ 900kb) and has small memory footprint (32MB of RAM is sufficient for both Server and Runtime).

  3. Server/Client Architecture

    Lintouch features server/client architecture: Lintouch Runtime provides a rich graphical user interface gathering the process data from Lintouch Server over a custom TCP/IP based communication protocol.

  4. Extensible

    The plugin based Lintouch architecture lets you implement new visualization objects and industrial communication protocols. These Connection Plugins and Template Libraries are loaded into Lintouch as DLL (Dynamic Loadable Library) files - the same way new plugins are installed into Adobe Photoshop, for example.

  5. Opensource

    Lintouch is being developed as an opensource software with all the source code, specifications, and documentation publicly available. It is distributed under the GNU GPL license which grants its users the right to modify the software to suit their own needs.


Project Mission

Lintouch's main goals are:

  1. Introducing opensource practices to the automation industry...

    ...automation and industry nowadays are dominated by big companies, much the same way software was a few years ago. The strength of opensource software has already been proven successful in the software world. With Lintouch, we hope to make difference in the automation area.

  2. Developing high quality HMI software...

    ...that will be able to compete with the commercial HMI software that dominate the automation market.

  3. Providing enterprise level support for an opensource product...

    ...being opensource gives developers and users a chance to share ideas, experiment with the software and affect its development. While Lintouch is an opensource product, it is still backed up by a strong company with the twenty five year experience in automation industry. This implies high quality commercial support is available.


Architecture

Lintouch Architecture

Lintouch Editor

You use Lintouch Editor to design your visualization/control screens (pages), specify images that will be displayed, configure objects, their behavior and connection to the monitored systems.

The resulting package called Lintouch Project can later be deployed to the Lintouch Server.

You can add new visualization objects by developing new Template Libraries that are as DLL files plugged to the existing Lintouch installation.

Lintouch Runtime

Lintouch Runtime downloads the deployed Lintouch Project, visualizes the screens, and sends user generated changes to the Lintouch Server.

The communication protocol used to exchange data among Lintouch Server and one or more Lintouch Runtimes is a custom made and documented protocol built on top of TCP/IP.

Lintouch Server

Lintouch Server connects to the monitored systems via special industrial protocols and sends changes of the data to the Lintouch Runtime.

New communication protocols can be plugged to the Lintouch Server by developing new Server Plugins that can be added as DLL files to the existing Lintouch installation.

History

Lintouch was initially developed as a port of SWAC's Wintouch product to Linux operating system. The year 2003 meant a major shift in the development of Lintouch when SWAC decided to release it as an opensource software available under GNU GPL.

Since then new versions have been released, new features have been added, and the list of users and involved developers have increased.

Lintouch milestones:

  • Nov 06 2003 - new website www.lintouch.org launched
  • Mar 04 2004 - Lintouch 1.0 released
  • Sep 23 2004 - Lintouch 1.2 released
  • Mar 07 2005 - Lintouch 1.4 released
  • Jul 02 2005 - Lintouch 1.6 released