This week, I’m rolling out the Lightwing project, a disruptive new approach to building digital signs, touch kiosks and interactive GUIs for ARM i.MX6 hardware from multiple board vendors. Lightwing is ground-breaking because it composites and renders everything, including text, images, video and animated 3D objects natively through OpenGL ES on ARM i.MX6 signage players. And Lightwing works without Android, Windows, JavaScript, web browsers or Adobe Flash. There’s no good reason to use these for digital signage. They only cause performance, maintenance and security problems. I have known this for awhile and now Lightwing proves the point.
Since Lightwing runs the same signage content on both Linux and Windows, it has been fascinating to see i.MX6 hardware (with 5 Watts of power) outperform Windows on my Intel Core i5, which has twice the processor cores, 3X the clock frequency, 16X more RAM and 100 Watts of power. It’s truly stunning what’s possible when you get rid of bloatware with well-targeted code!
The part that surprised me is that it’s actually easier to author and update content this way too – with open tools. Building custom digital signs and touch-panel control applications is now a lot more accessible to a lot more people. Lightwing has serious commercial potential, so I am expanding this blog to offer and support Lightwing software on the best i.MX6 hardware. I plan to support more i.MX6 vendors over time. I also have ideas for additional features that will drive Lightwing into new applications. As always, I want to hear your ideas too!
To learn more, see the Lightwing Introduction and download the free Lightwing SDK for Windows to get started!