I've got a student group that's interested in trying this out - but only if it's on a Linux OS. What's the plan for this port?

BTW, he sees the usefulness much as Johan does - for monitoring motors and PID controllers during development, and for a low-level operator interface to "manually" monitor switches and control motors. Then, when the loops are working well, he would go to a C/C++ program for the "final" product.

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Kevin Nickels, Assoc. Prof, Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA

Hi.

Seems like we could co-operate on this one :-)
It would be really nice to develop this platform. It has a lot of potential, both for teaching purposes and projects like RoboCup and others.


Best regards,
Johan

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Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

Hi Kevin,

We have actually run LabVIEW on embedded Linux for quite some time...

We generally use a cross-compiler that is hosted on a windows PC...something that runs in cygwin. I have personally run LabVIEW generated code on MIPS, x86, and PPC targets.

If you'd like more info, you should probably start by looking at this tutorial on how to get LabVIEW running on a new platform.

https://sine.ni.com/apps/utf8/nigb.main ... LVPORTEMBD

Feel free to post with any questions.

P.J.

PJ, as the LabVIEW Embedded Product Manager for National Instruments, we think it is absolutely fantastic that you are posting and interacting here. That is great! 8)

Thanks!

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

My pleasure! :D

P.J.

With an invitation like that... :)

Perhaps I misunderstood the effort here - I know that the RT embedded targets with the host/target have been available for quite a while. That's great when your target is doing the data acquisition/processing, but the EFIKA in general uses a USB DAQ to acquire the data. I guess that you could use the audio for analog I/O. So I don't see what having a host/target setup (with a USB DAQ connected to the EFIKA) gets you over just running Labview on the Host and plugging the USB DAQ into the Host.

I thought that NI was looking at using the EFIKA to do self-hosting of LabView. Like when I just "run labview" on an x86 linux box with a PCI DAQ card, except with a USB one (yes, I know the Windows folks have used USB DAQ with "standard" LabView for a while now). So I guess that's just a matter of porting the Linux version of Labview to PPC, right?

I guess that my confusion is this - the EFIKA looks to me much more like a general-purpose PC (albeit PPC) than like a microcontroller with it's own D2A, Digtital IO, etc. I can see the use of Labview/Embedded for a gumstix linux or somesuch, but I'd think that self-hosted would make more sense here.

What am I missing?

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Kevin Nickels, Assoc. Prof, Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA

Hold on Kevin!

We should have a BSP for you shortly...

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Hey Kevin,

These are great questions. Forgive me, I thought that I had posted a reply before the holiday, but apparently my web browser timed out.

The reason that we can't just run "regular" LabVIEW for desktop VIs on the EFIKA is becasue a LabVIEW application consists of two components...the VI (which is OS/architecture agnostic)and the run-time engine (which is specific to a given combination of OS and processor architecture). We have a version of the run-time engine that runs on PPC processors that was originally developed for the Mac, and we have a version of the run-time engine that runs on Linux systems on x86 machince. However, we don't have a Linux PPC port... you can see how this would quickly spin out of control if LabVIEW R&D needed to support every embedded OS and every architecture.

With that in mind, we decided to develop one more "compiler", but intead of a VI executable, this creates C Code. With the LabVIEW Embedded Development Module, we provide C source for the run-time functions so that our users can leverage one of the many C cross compilers.

I hope that this helps clear things up.

Thanks!
P.J.