SCADA and HMI Charting for Windows IoT and ARM64

Industrial systems run on Windows. Control rooms, panel PCs, machine HMIs and SCADA clients have been Windows desktops for thirty years, and they are now moving to ARM64, fanless enclosures, lower power draw, longer service life. ProEssentials is a native C++ charting engine that follows them there, and it has been running inside 24/7 processes for close to thirty years. The same engine that renders 100 million points in roughly 15 milliseconds on a workstation compiles and runs as a native ARM64 binary, so a trend display on a fanless panel PC uses the identical rendering path as the engineering station it reports to.

Why ProEssentials Is Best for SCADA, HMI and Panel PC Systems

• Thirty years inside 24/7 processes. Not a benchmark claim, a service record. ProEssentials has been running continuously in production systems since 1993.
• Zero-copy data. Your tag history array is read where it already lives. No marshalling, no duplicate buffers, no garbage-collection pauses in the middle of an alarm.
• Zero GPU cost when nothing changes. The chart renders on new data, not on a continuous animation loop, the difference between a cool enclosure and a hot one.
• Native ARM64. A real ARM64 engine binary, not x64 running under emulation.
• Native C++ under a thin .NET wrapper. The CLR never JIT-compiles a charting engine; only the lightweight wrapper is JIT’d.
• Real-time circular buffers. Streaming trend data appends without reallocating or shifting the array.
• One engine across every Windows interface: WinUI 3, WPF, WinForms, MFC C++, Delphi VCL and ActiveX, which is what a plant floor full of different-aged applications actually needs.
• Perpetual, royalty-free licensing that survives a twenty-year machine lifecycle.
• AI code assistance validated against the DLL, so a controls engineer without a software team can still get working code.

Proven in Processes That Do Not Stop

Benchmarks are easy to publish. Staying up is not. ProEssentials has been running inside continuous 24/7 processes for close to thirty years: refineries, test cells, monitoring stations and machine controllers that are never restarted on a schedule and never get a maintenance window when something drifts.

That is a different engineering problem from peak frame rate. What kills a charting component in a plant is not throughput; it is the slow accumulation: a handle that is not released, a bitmap cache that grows, a few kilobytes leaked per update that becomes a gigabyte by month three. ProEssentials renders on demand and reads your data in place, so the steady state genuinely is steady: no per-frame allocation, no duplicate buffers, nothing accumulating between events. Thirty years of shipping into that environment is the reason the engine is conservative by design.

The customer list reflects it. In industrial automation and process control: Rockwell Automation, Emerson Process, ABB, Siemens, Trane, Pentair, Crane Nuclear and Wunderlich-Malec Engineering. In energy: Halliburton, Chevron, Shell, Schlumberger, Baker Hughes and Koch Industries. In test and measurement: Fluke, Teledyne, MISTRAS, AVL List, Carl Zeiss, OMICRON and SuperFlow. NXP Semiconductors is there too, the same silicon vendor Microsoft names for Windows IoT Enterprise on Arm, as is Open Automation Software, a SCADA platform vendor in its own right. Many have published named testimonials. Read the customer reviews.

Zero-Copy Data: The Pointer Passes Straight Through

Most charting libraries ask you to hand them a copy of your data. At SCADA scale that copy is the bottleneck: a historian pull becomes an allocation, the allocation becomes garbage, and the garbage becomes a pause at exactly the wrong moment.

ProEssentials takes a different route. With UseDataAtLocation the engine reads your existing array in place, the pointer is passed straight through to the native engine and the GPU compute shader. Nothing is duplicated. Combined with native CircularBuffers for streaming tags, a live trend can append thousands of samples per second without reallocating, shifting, or copying a single element.

That is the whole proof, and it is measurable: 100 million points re-rendered in about 15 milliseconds, a fully fresh 100-million-point frame on screen in about 65 milliseconds. We wrote a song about it, and the chorus is honest: zero copy, pointer passed straight through; nobody renders like we do.

Zero GPU When Idle: Built for Fanless Panel PCs

This is the difference that matters most in an enclosure and is the least discussed. Some high-performance chart engines are built on a continuous render loop, redrawing at 60 frames per second whether the data changed or not. On a trading desk that is the correct design. On a sealed panel PC bolted to a machine, it is sixty renders per second of heat you have to get rid of, on every chart, forever.

ProEssentials renders on demand. When your tags stop updating, GPU cost goes to zero. Eight idle charts cost nothing; a continuous-loop engine would be burning 480 frames per second of wasted work across the same screen. For battery-powered, fanless, or enclosed systems, and for medical and embedded devices where thermal budget is a design constraint, that is a structural advantage, not a tuning option.

Native ARM64 for Windows on Arm and Windows IoT Enterprise

Microsoft’s own ARM64 guidance names human machine interfaces, thin clients, kiosks and gateways as target device classes, and Windows IoT Enterprise on Arm brings the full Windows feature set to Snapdragon and NXP i.MX silicon with long-term servicing.

ProEssentials v11 ships a real native ARM64 engine binary (PEGRPARM64I.DLL) alongside the x64 and x86 engines. An AnyCPU assembly embeds them and binds the one matching the running process, so a single build can deploy to an x64 engineering station and an ARM64 panel PC and run natively on both, no emulation layer, no separate product, no reduced feature set. It is built to run wherever Windows on Arm runs, including Windows IoT Enterprise on Arm devices.

ProEssentials and SciChart for SCADA and HMI

SciChart is a genuinely fast, well-engineered charting library and a well-known name in high-performance HMI and SCADA visualization. If your application is a continuously animating display, a trading terminal, a constantly redrawing ticker, their continuous 60 fps game-loop architecture is the right design and they do it well. For a SCADA, HMI or embedded target, however, ProEssentials v11 bests them in a long list of ways, and the summary is below. The differences are architectural, not marketing: they matter specifically when the target is an ARM64 panel PC, a fanless enclosure, or a WinUI 3 application.

Full detail on each of these points lives on the performance and GPU architecture comparison, the platform coverage comparison, and the pricing and support comparison.

AI Code Assistance for Control and Process Engineers

Something important is changing on the plant floor. Mechanical, process, instrumentation and controls engineers no longer need a team of expert software developers to visualize their data in a custom application. AI has closed that gap, but only when the AI is given ground truth instead of guesses.

ProEssentials v11 ships pe_query, a Python tool that gives any AI assistant on-demand access to the complete API, all 1,200+ properties, 169 enumerations and 116 working examples, with a validation layer that checks every property path against the DLL itself. That is the difference between an assistant that writes working chart code and one that invents property names that do not exist. It works with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, GitHub Copilot and Cursor, and it is included free with every v11 license.

For engineers without a software background, we also offer custom starter projects with instructions that get you most of the way there, plus inexpensive help on larger ideas. It helps to be an experienced software developer. It is no longer required. Explore the AI Code Assistant.

Licensing That Matches a Twenty-Year Machine Life

Industrial equipment is not a web app. A machine shipped this year may still be running in 2046, and Windows IoT Enterprise LTSC is built for exactly that, ten years of security updates with no feature churn on a fixed-function device.

A charting component licensed by annual subscription is a poor fit for that world: the renewal outlives the project, and a lapsed subscription becomes a support problem on a machine nobody wants to touch. ProEssentials is perpetual. Pay once, use forever, royalty-free deployment to unlimited end-user machines, free unlimited support for life, no annual renewal and no reactivation fee. The license model matches the equipment lifecycle instead of fighting it.

One Engine Across Every Windows Interface

A working plant rarely has one generation of software. There is a new WinUI 3 operator screen, a WPF engineering client, a WinForms utility somebody wrote in 2012, an MFC C++ machine controller and a Delphi tool that still runs the test cell. ProEssentials is the same native engine behind all of them, WinUI 3, WPF, WinForms, WebForms, MFC C++, Delphi VCL and ActiveX, with the same property tree and the same rendering. Port a chart between interfaces by changing the control type; the charting code itself does not change.

ProEssentials Is Used By

A partial list, drawn from three decades of licences and published customer reviews. Industrial automation, energy, test and measurement, manufacturing, semiconductor and aerospace, the industries that run continuous processes and cannot afford a chart that drifts.

Read the named customer reviews

Try It on Your Own Data

Clone and run a working example, or download the full evaluation and point it at a real historian tag. No-hassle evaluation download · WinUI 3 walk-through · Open-source demos on GitHub · Contact and support