I recently built a machine with a couple of beams, a Hall effect switch, heater, thermocouple and a couple of badass stepper motors with external controllers.

I recently built a machine with a couple of beams, a Hall effect switch, heater, thermocouple and a couple of badass stepper motors with external controllers. Wrote my whole stack in C# / Winforms and deploy to a Mono running on a Raspberry Pi 4. UI runs on main thread and is purely viewing and event generation. On a background thread, I have a homegrown cooperative multitasking state machine driven kernel that handles all interaction with the machinery. Works awesome. Plenty of CPU to spare. And event response is < 5ms typically, which is based on the timer interval. Only two downsides, only printf debugging. I gave up after a couple of days of following SO and various tutorials on how to get the remote Mono / .NET debugger working. Maybe if I switch to WPF…but I avoided that because the Interface Designer for VS was half-baked (and sucked) at the time. Second downside, some weird point map scaling variation between the Interface Designer and Mono placing with the window under the WM. I worked around by incorporating a build script to parse the source of the form and write out an initialization routine to fix the size and location of all screen elements. It’s definitely sketchy but it works. The end result says it all though. My UI and responsiveness beats the snot out of machines we’ve spent multiple $100K on that run Win Embedded + PLC architecture.