Hello,
The project I'm working on is a waste water managment and seal water control system. It will be used in the decommisioning phase of our power plant. The system controlled are a lot of existing pumps and 8 new pumps, there isn't a lot of logic involved, the most logic will be the operator faceplates and a system overview.
The initial plan was to run the whole system on 2 IPC's (also ESXI's) running debian 12 for each node. But since I'm going to reuse some PC's already installed with screens on the control desk, the operator stations will be on those existing PC's. The process nodes will be run in redundancy mode controlling about an 7 islands with a lot of IO's (mainly valve OLS/CLS, pump status and tank levels). So it will be a nice system
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In the meantime I've tried out Marc's solution and idd this is basic, but maybe a bit to basic so I'll try out some window managers. I see you mention LXDE, I'm going to give that oen a shot and I think there are a lot of resources available since the PI's are using it. Although some interresting tricks are always welcome (trying out not to reinvent the wheel here).
I must say the second reason a moved the operator stations towards an external PC was that I noticed some influence from my developer station on to my process nodes. it was eating resources and causing some delays in my PLC counts. Now I've installed the RT kernel in debian (reason why I switched from Ubuntu to Debian) and since then the performance is a lot better, but leaving me with some thinking about having my op stations onto the same esxi (the servers are Siemens IPC647D's, so not the newest ones).
So that's in short the story, a lot of work to do (hard and software), but I've still got some time: implementation will be end this year.