Deploying LabVIEW to Intel Edison

[jdieringer]

I had a LabVIEW user group meeting last week talking about embedded platforms and when I got home I saw the Intel Edison collecting dust on my desk:

 

 

Since it is x86, I thought I would try to deploy a Linux LabVIEW executable to the Edison and run it in the Run Time Environment. Here is what I did:

 

1) Install Ubilinux, based on Debian Linux, from: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/loading-debian-ubilinux-on-the-edison

2) Install xvfb, a virtual framebuffer display server (no video on this device), fluxbox display manager and x11vnc:

apt-get install xvfb fluxbox x11vnc xterm

3) Install the prereqs for the LabVIEW RTE (this was already installed with the above, but good to check): 

apt-get install libxinerama1 libgl1-mesa-glx

4) Download the RTE and unzip it, I put it in /home as /root gets pretty full

wget http://ftp.ni.com/support/softlib/labview/labview_runtime/2014/Linux/LabVIEW2014RTE_Linux.tgz
tar zxvf LabVIEW2014RTE_Linux.tgz

6) the RTE is an rpm and we need deb so get alien: 

apt-get install alien

7) convert the rpm to deb (this takes a while): 

alien -k -c labview-2014-rte-14.0.0-1.i386.rpm

8) Install the RTE: 

dpkg -i labview-2014-rte_14.0.0_1.i386.deb

9) Install some missing fonts: 

apt-get install xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi xfonts-scalable xfonts-cyrillic ttf-mscorefonts-installer

At this point, I compiled the "UDP sender" from the examples using LabVIEW for Linux 2014 with my desktop hardcoded as the destination IP address. I copied the executable over to the Edison, ran it as follows:

xvfb-run ./send

and a few seconds later on my desktop:

 

 

I am getting UDP packets from my Edison to my host computer sent from a LabVIEW application! I was pretty excited by this. At this point, I decided that I wanted to see if I could get a GUI running. 

 

I started up a virtual display and launched fluxbox using:

Xvfb -screen 0 800x600x16 -ac &
DISPLAY=:0 fluxbox &

And from a linux VM, I created a SSH tunnel and started a VNC connection

ssh -l root -L 5900:localhost:5900 192.168.222.90 'x11vnc -localhost -display :0'
vncviewer localhost

I was greeted with a desktop so I launched a terminal and executed the send program. Here is the result:

 

 

So there you have it, LabVIEW executables running on a headless Intel Edison with remote desktop support. Oh, and once the VI is running from the remote desktop, you are free to disconnect and reconnect without terminating the running VI.

 

As to resource usage, I show while running everything:

root@ubilinux:~# free -h
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          960M       174M       786M         0B       9.0M       100M
-/+ buffers/cache:        64M       896M
Swap:           0B         0B         0B

htop:

  1  [##**                      9.6%]     Tasks: 35, 12 thr; 1 running
  2  [##***                    12.7%]     Load average: 0.15 0.20 0.11
  Mem[|||#****              65/960MB]     Uptime: 00:07:25
  Swp[                         0/0MB]

  PID USER      PRI  NI  VIRT   RES   SHR S CPU% MEM%   TIME+  Command
 2018 root       20   0 16132  5428  2772 S  5.0  0.6  0:19.94 x11vnc -localhost
 2047 root       20   0  4380  1580  1204 R  5.0  0.2  0:00.83 htop
 2033 root       20   0  120M 39620 27756 S  5.0  4.0  0:16.89 ./send
 1987 root       20   0 52136 14608  5016 S  3.0  1.5  0:17.00 Xvfb -screen 0 80
 2016 root       20   0 12540  6300  2436 S  0.0  0.6  0:02.85 sshd: root@notty
    1 root       20   0  2200   716   616 S  0.0  0.1  0:00.81 init [2]
  202 root       20   0  2540  1108   716 S  0.0  0.1  0:00.28 udevd --daemon
  360 root       20   0  2536   816   428 S  0.0  0.1  0:00.01 udevd --daemon
  366 root       20   0  2536   820   428 S  0.0  0.1  0:00.00 udevd --daemon
 1552 root       20   0  5760  1424  1040 S  0.0  0.1  0:00.14 /sbin/wpa_supplic
 1752 root       20   0 27916  1680  1116 S  0.0  0.2  0:00.17 /usr/sbin/rsyslog
 1754 root       20   0 27916  1680  1116 S  0.0  0.2  0:00.01 /usr/sbin/rsyslog
 1755 root       20   0 27916  1680  1116 S  0.0  0.2  0:00.01 /usr/sbin/rsyslog
 1747 root       20   0 27916  1680  1116 S  0.0  0.2  0:00.23 /usr/sbin/rsyslog
 1801 root       20   0  2424   608   520 S  0.0  0.1  0:00.00 /usr/sbin/udhcpd
 1837 ntp        20   0  5304  2020  1572 S  0.0  0.2  0:00.11 /usr/sbin/ntpd -p
F1Help  F2Setup F3SearchF4FilterF5Tree  F6SortByF7Nice -F8Nice +F9Kill  F10Quit

The VI is using about 5% CPU as well as 5% on the the VNC server and 3% on the virtual framebuffer.

 

Here is the disk usage:

root@ubilinux:~# df -h
Filesystem       Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs           1.4G  1.3G   78M  95% /
/dev/root        1.4G  1.3G   78M  95% /
devtmpfs         480M     0  480M   0% /dev
tmpfs             97M  300K   96M   1% /run
tmpfs            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs            193M     0  193M   0% /run/shm
tmpfs            481M   12K  481M   1% /tmp
/dev/mmcblk0p7    32M  5.3M   27M  17% /boot
/dev/mmcblk0p10  1.3G  125M  1.2G  10% /home

It's pretty tight, you will definitely run out if you do not do the RTE installation from /home. As to IO, I have not played much with doing anything with the IO ports, that's next on my list. I wanted to share my progress so far and get people's feedback.

 

Thanks

Jon 

 

 

Edited November 4, 2015 by jdieringer

[VDB]

Great job! Guess I need to dust of my Edison as well...

[venugopal]

great job,

 

can you share the docs of the board so that ill plan to purchase

[JoeWang2015]

Hello :

 

Could you explain more on that following session:

At this point, I compiled the "UDP sender" from the examples using LabVIEW for Linux 2014 with my desktop hardcoded as the destination IP address. I copied the executable over to the Edison

 

I did not catch up that session?

 

Many thanks.