R&D project - jpg charts for low powered hardware

Switch Automation is a cloud based control and automation platform. We are open standards and hardware agnostic. One of our key points of difference is our ability to deliver intercom and energy monitoring into apartment developments. We are currently experimenting with developing user interfaces for low cpu powered hardware. Low powered hardware is inexpensive but also uses less power to run. This is critical point of difference but we need to be able to create engaging interfaces for these panels. if you take a look at our website you can see some of the solutions we have developed for this market using silverlight UI but that will not run on this low powered hardware so we need to come up with some alternative options. ## Deliverables We have a project that is apartments that require energy metering in-home displays but they have no intercom requirements so we have sourced a low powered RISC processor panel. The challenge is to see if we can create really good looking charting and gauges. This hardware cannot run silverlight but we think we could create jpeg charting images on the fly and serve these up to the touch screen. Please take a look at this url [login to view URL] So imagine a server that services the building, a resident selects a menu item on the touch screen, the command routes from the touch screen to the building server. A webservice retrieves the data from the cloud and the server runs a program to create a graph which is served up to the touch screen. So the project requirements are as follows 1. experiment with the .net charting service and perhaps others to see what kind of charts we can build into jpgs and how good we can make them look 2. using our webservice run tests to make sure that the performance would be good enough to run this off the cloud AND serve to our customers in timely manner 3. if that works then we would need to run some load testing to make sure that 10 or 20 people could all do this at once to make sure it wont drag the whole system to hald 4. if that all checks out then build container in html for the graphing application 5. as a back ground task - tap your brain for other ways that we can deliver this type of application in a really great UI engaging experience on low end hardware We are also investigating the possibility of building our whole UI into HTML4 or 5 for the Android, ipad, smart phone devices so this is potentially a precursor to that this energy app that we are writing for low end hardware can potentially be wrapped into an iphone, android wrapper as an app The touch screen will have html around the outside of image and the image will go to the placeholder in the middle So the questions are 1. will performance be good enough 2. will we be able to get a good enough user experience out of this 3. can we extend this concept to other functionality i think this is a small R&D project but I think it could lead to bigger things