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Industrial HMI Platform

About Schneider Electric

Schneider Electric is one of the world's largest industrial automation and energy management companies, founded in 1836 and operating in more than a hundred countries. Its Harmony HMI panels are the operator interface for factories, substations, water treatment plants, and process lines around the world.

When Schneider Electric set out to take a generation of HMI graphics from Windows to embedded Linux on tightly constrained industrial hardware, the team chose Avalonia. This is the story of why.

1836

Year founded

100+

Countries served

150K+

Employees worldwide

512MB

RAM on the target HMI device

Avalonia Highlights

Custom-tuned Avalonia for embedded Linux on industrial hardware
Direct framebuffer rendering with no windowing system
WPF-style XAML and controls for a deeply .NET-grounded engineering team
Existing WinForms control library lifted onto Avalonia equivalents
Multi-language and on-screen keyboard support out of the box
Independent third-party cybersecurity evaluation passed at the supplier level
Continuous partnership across the Avalonia 0.10 to Avalonia 11 transition

A widescreen Schneider Electric Harmony HMI panel showing a "Bio Energy" process screen — left-hand navigation column (Home, Settings, Monitoring, Alarm & Trend), a 3D-rendered industrial scene with mixers and tanks, live tank volumes, year-to-date production figures, and a Trend control along the bottom — A Harmony HMI panel running Schneider Electric's graphics platform on Avalonia, on embedded Linux.

A Heritage Customer with a Hard Problem

Schneider Electric has been in the business of industrial automation for longer than most modern computing exists, and its HMI panels are the operator interface for plants, substations, and process lines around the world. The Harmony HMIST6 series sits at the heart of that family, with embedded controllers that run on small displays and modest hardware budgets, in environments where the cost of a confusing frame is measured in operator hesitation rather than missed pixels.

When Schneider Electric set out to bring its existing Windows-based HMI graphics onto an embedded Linux target, the constraints were unforgiving. The hardware in question shipped with as little as 512MB of RAM, no windowing system, and rendering directly to the framebuffer. The existing graphics library had been built on WinForms, with its own controls and behaviours refined over years of factory deployment. A clean rewrite was off the table. A blind port to a foreign UI framework was off the table. The brief was to keep what worked, change only what had to change, and land it on Linux without compromising what operators had come to expect.

Why a Custom Avalonia Port

Avalonia turned out to be the right fit for the job. It is fully cross-platform, fully .NET, and fully open at the source. That last quality mattered enormously: the hardware constraints meant Schneider Electric did not need a UI framework so much as a UI framework that could be tuned for their specific platform. Because AvaloniaUI built Avalonia from the ground up, anything the standard configuration could not do could either be taught to it or restructured to fit.

The work was scoped as a phased Agile engagement. A first evaluation phase proved the concept on real Schneider hardware, including direct framebuffer rendering, language support across French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese, and an integrated on-screen keyboard for the smaller display variants. A development phase converted the WinForms-shaped control surface onto Avalonia equivalents, with unit and integration tests that proved behavioural parity against the existing system. A separate engagement, fronted by Thales as system integrator, brought a full-featured charting and Trend control onto the same platform by integrating the existing TeeChart library against Avalonia.

A Schneider Electric Harmony HMI panel showing a process-monitoring screen — three temperature-controlled stations on the left, a target-vs-actual fill indicator at 48% of a 60% target on the right, and three OEE-style KPI tiles along the bottom for Availability, Performance and Quality

A Schneider Electric Harmony HMI panel showing a Status Monitoring screen — twin radial gauges reading 37 kPa and 771 cc with min/max limits, three vertical level bars for weight, capacity and total, and a row of Steam/Exhaust selectors and Monitoring/Trend/Alarm push buttons

A Familiar Developer Experience on Unfamiliar Hardware

For the Schneider Electric engineering team, the appeal of Avalonia was not just that it ran on the target hardware. It was that it looked and felt like the WPF and WinForms world they had spent years inside. Avalonia's XAML and styling system is recognisable from the first line, and the control model is close enough to WPF that existing muscle memory transfers cleanly. For a team responsible for safety-relevant industrial software, that familiarity is not cosmetic. It is what lets engineers reason confidently about behaviour, debug under pressure, and onboard new contributors without months of ramp time.

Knowledge transfer has been a constant thread. Steven Kirk, AvaloniaUI's CTO and the original architect of Avalonia, spent on-site time with the Schneider Electric engineers responsible for keeping the platform running, transferring framework knowledge directly. Formal training engagements followed, with structured sessions and bug-fixing time built into the same agreement. The relationship is now backed by Enterprise Support, giving the team direct access to AvaloniaUI engineering for ongoing platform questions.

Five Years In, Now on Avalonia 11

The engagement began in 2021 with a four-phase project plan and remains active today, including a substantial 2024 port onto Avalonia 11 and a detailed performance investigation on the HMIST6700. Avalonia 11 brought concrete improvements that mattered for this kind of work: a faster property system, granular packaging that strips unused subsystems out of the binary, and a new composition rendering engine that moves work to a background thread on capable hardware. It also brought UI Automation, full right-to-left language support, and the first wave of SkiaSharp 3.0 integration.

Schneider Electric did not just adopt a UI framework. They built a working relationship with the team behind one — which is what made an embedded engagement of this depth possible in the first place.

Avalonia is used in production HMIs, embedded systems, and OEM software where standard UI frameworks fall short. If your platform has a similar shape, we'd like to hear about it.

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