Build smart display devices with Mir: fast to production, secure, open-source

Alex Cattle

on 29 November 2019

This article is more than 5 years old.


Industrial robots, home appliances, advertising screens, office information boards… devices of every type around us are getting connected. As they do, their screens turn from single purpose displays to reconfigurable, multi-purpose smart display. As the amount of code required to build these displays, the production time and maintenance burden have increased, this has prompted device manufacturers to reconsider how they can build smart display devices faster and more securely based on open source frameworks.

Mir is a library for writing graphical shells for Linux and similar operating systems. Compared to traditional display servers, it offers numerous benefits that are important for IoT devices: efficiency, speed of development, security, performance, and flexibility. All are required by the devices of today, and even more so for the devices of tomorrow. In this whitepaper we’ll explain how Mir, alongside Ubuntu Core and Snapcraft, lets developers build devices that are ready for the future of IoT, while offering stable, secure and performant solutions to the problems the industry faces today.

In this whitepaper you will learn:

  • The history of Mir and why it was developed to solve reusability and security issues in IoT2
  • The technical architecture of the Mir display library and how Mir compares to alternative IoT technologies
  • Example use cases of Mir and how to get started on your smart display project with Mir

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