wuke Posted July 10, 2008 Report Share Posted July 10, 2008 Hi everybody, I'm looking for an ARM9 based development kit, with the SDRAM of at least 64M, ethernet, audio and LCD connection. I have been looking around for a long time and found nothing exactly meets my requirement. Since you guys have much more experiences in this area than I do, would you plz recommend one to me? thanks a lot! Quote Link to comment
Francois Normandin Posted July 10, 2008 Report Share Posted July 10, 2008 Contact your local NI representative and look at this evaluation kit. NI has support for ARM7, ARM9 & CortexM3. Quote Link to comment
wuke Posted July 11, 2008 Author Report Share Posted July 11, 2008 Hello all! I am back with good news! I finally found one kit named AT2440 yesterday at www.developmentboard.net . I think it would be perfect for me. The board is nice, it meets all of my requiremenst, and contains all the necessary accessaries. The price is reasonable. And the company in China would provide me English instruction files, so I can modify it by myself in the future and learn more about the embedded things. I found that development kits from China are really cheap, maybe you guys should try this http://www.developmentboard.net next time when you need some boards. Wuke QUOTE (normandinf @ Jul 9 2008, 01:00 PM) Contact your local NI representative and look at this http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/205040' target="_blank">evaluation kit.NI has support for ARM7, ARM9 & CortexM3. Thanks normandinf! Your recommendation is really helpful, thanks a lot! what do you think of the board above? the price OK? Quote Link to comment
Nighthunter Posted July 20, 2008 Report Share Posted July 20, 2008 How about this: Keil Dev Board MCB-STR9... R Quote Link to comment
wuke Posted August 26, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 26, 2008 QUOTE (Nighthunter @ Jul 19 2008, 07:21 AM) How about this: Keil Dev Board MCB-STR9...R Thank you Nighthunter, would you please give me a link to this? I mean I have already bought the http://www.developmentboard.net/index.php/productdetail/Development+boards/ARM9/SAMSUNG/S3C2440/AT2440' rel='nofollow' target="_blank">AT2440 dev board, it is as good as I thought, handy, steady, cool, it is performing perfect. however I still need another one that embodies GPRS connection. Could you guys recommend me one? Quote Link to comment
cocomalu Posted November 6, 2008 Report Share Posted November 6, 2008 QUOTE (wuke @ Aug 25 2008, 10:02 AM) Thank you Nighthunter,would you please give me a link to this? I mean I have already bought the AT2440 dev board, it is as good as I thought, handy, steady, cool, it is performing perfect. however I still need another one that embodies GPRS connection. Could you guys recommend me one? their MINI2440 with LCD seems interesting and inexpensive. How much time did it take for your delivery? and would there be much trouble to buy from them? Quote Link to comment
sriks Posted February 3, 2009 Report Share Posted February 3, 2009 QUOTE (wuke @ Aug 25 2008, 02:32 PM) Thank you Nighthunter,would you please give me a link to this? I mean I have already bought the http://www.developmentboard.net/index.php/productdetail/Development+boards/ARM9/SAMSUNG/S3C2440/AT2440' rel='nofollow' target="_blank">AT2440 dev board, it is as good as I thought, handy, steady, cool, it is performing perfect. however I still need another one that embodies GPRS connection. Could you guys recommend me one? Hi Wuke, Did you tried to port NI Mobile/TPC to 2440 board? I did few samples like, but did you had any luck with controling I/O's? Hope you could help me on this. Regards Sriks Quote Link to comment
wuke Posted March 18, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 18, 2009 QUOTE (sriks @ Feb 2 2009, 09:37 AM) Hi Wuke,Did you tried to port NI Mobile/TPC to 2440 board? I did few samples like, but did you had any luck with controling I/O's? Hope you could help me on this. Regards Sriks I've not done that yet, sorry. Maybe someone else can help a little bit here? Quote Link to comment
Justin Reina Posted March 18, 2009 Report Share Posted March 18, 2009 Hey wuke, Our embedded professor has had a lot of success with Olimex http://www.olimex.com/dev/ Their Sam9-L9260 is only $200, and meets your requirements with plenty IO. Best of luck with your decisions and keep us posted, kinda fun thread to follow -Justin oops- their 261 board is the model with upfront LCD support -Justin Quote Link to comment
wuke Posted March 26, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 26, 2009 QUOTE (JustinReina @ Mar 17 2009, 06:19 PM) Hey wuke, Our embedded professor has had a lot of success with Olimex http://www.olimex.com/dev/ Their Sam9-L9260 is only $200, and meets your requirements with plenty IO. Best of luck with your decisions and keep us posted, kinda fun thread to follow -Justin oops- their 261 board is the model with upfront LCD support -Justin Thanks a lot Justin, I have had my success on the AT2440 too. And now I'm working on the SKY2440-v2 with 7" TFT LCD kit from the same site, perfect as well, hopefully I can finish my project very soon Quote Link to comment
PeterB Posted October 27, 2009 Report Share Posted October 27, 2009 who wrot ehti Contact your local NI representative and look at this evaluation kit. NI has support for ARM7, ARM9 & CortexM3. NI evaluation kits with Hardware only have 'out of the box' solutions that work with an ARM7 or a Cortex-M3. I am interested in an NI "out of the box" solution supporting the ARM9 to minimise configuration time and increase my productivity. I recently emailed 'Jamie Brettle' (Product Manager for LV Embedded S/W) who wrote this article. and asked him if NI has any plans to release something for the ARM9 and here was his response: "Just to give some context in the choices of chips that we picked - given ARMs plans for the Cortex M line of processors, we anticipate that their performance will reach that of the ARM9 line while providing the benefits of the Cortex architecture (reduced power consumption, memory size). When this happens LabVIEW should be able to take advantage of this additional processing capabilities. I'm not sure of a timeline for that (both from NI's and ARM's perspective) but in the interim we will keep an eye on the requests from our customers to provide an out of box ARM9 experience. I will keep you up to date with any developments that happen." So if you have written LabVIEW code for an ARM9, how did you find the experience and would you have preferred an "out of the box" solution if it existed ? regards Peter Badcock Product Development ResMed Ltd Quote Link to comment
ShaunR Posted October 27, 2009 Report Share Posted October 27, 2009 who wrot ehti NI evaluation kits with Hardware only have 'out of the box' solutions that work with an ARM7 or a Cortex-M3. I am interested in an NI "out of the box" solution supporting the ARM9 to minimise configuration time and increase my productivity. I recently emailed 'Jamie Brettle' (Product Manager for LV Embedded S/W) who wrote this article. and asked him if NI has any plans to release something for the ARM9 and here was his response: "Just to give some context in the choices of chips that we picked - given ARMs plans for the Cortex M line of processors, we anticipate that their performance will reach that of the ARM9 line while providing the benefits of the Cortex architecture (reduced power consumption, memory size). When this happens LabVIEW should be able to take advantage of this additional processing capabilities. I'm not sure of a timeline for that (both from NI's and ARM's perspective) but in the interim we will keep an eye on the requests from our customers to provide an out of box ARM9 experience. I will keep you up to date with any developments that happen." So if you have written LabVIEW code for an ARM9, how did you find the experience and would you have preferred an "out of the box" solution if it existed ? regards Peter Badcock Product Development ResMed Ltd I was interested in the ARM deveopment toolkit and asked the sales rep to come in, demo it and leave it with me for a couple of weeks. Long story short, I didn't bother with the demo kit and he left with it. The toolkit I saw was basically a C generator. there were limited vis that enable you to do certain things, but you cannot modify them. If you look inside theres nothing in them. When I asked (for example) "this matrix display demo, how do I modify it ?" He said you generate the c code and modify the c code to whatever you want It looked to me like a C template generator that you then go into and modify in the C environment of your choice. You might as well either write in in C in the first place or give it to a C coder since they are 10-a-penny. The sales guy couldn't really come up with a good reason for me to spend £3K on a toolkit when we've got ten C programmers on the payroll. Quote Link to comment
PeterB Posted October 27, 2009 Report Share Posted October 27, 2009 I was interested in the ARM deveopment toolkit and asked the sales rep to come in, demo it and leave it with me for a couple of weeks. Long story short, I didn't bother with the demo kit and he left with it. The toolkit I saw was basically a C generator. there were limited vis that enable you to do certain things, but you cannot modify them. If you look inside theres nothing in them. When I asked (for example) "this matrix display demo, how do I modify it ?" He said you generate the c code and modify the c code to whatever you want It looked to me like a C template generator that you then go into and modify in the C environment of your choice. You might as well either write in in C in the first place or give it to a C coder since they are 10-a-penny. The sales guy couldn't really come up with a good reason for me to spend £3K on a toolkit when we've got ten C programmers on the payroll. That's rather dissapointing Shaun. Was it an NI sales rep or some 3rd party rep ? Either way I hope they didn't know what they were on about. I naively assumed LabVIEW for ARM/Cortex would be more flexible than that. Anybody else used LabVIEW with ARM or Cortex care to shed light on their negative or positive experiences ? Was anybody satisfied with their "Out of the box" experience ? regards Peter Badcock Product Development ResMed Ltd Quote Link to comment
ShaunR Posted October 27, 2009 Report Share Posted October 27, 2009 That's rather dissapointing Shaun. Was it an NI sales rep or some 3rd party rep ? Either way I hope they didn't know what they were on about. I naively assumed LabVIEW for ARM/Cortex would be more flexible than that. Anybody else used LabVIEW with ARM or Cortex care to shed light on their negative or positive experiences ? Was anybody satisfied with their "Out of the box" experience ? regards Peter Badcock Product Development ResMed Ltd It was an NI rep and the toolkit was "The Embedded Module for ARM Microcontrollers" This is what it says in the sales blarb: The Embedded Module for ARM Microcontrollers includes the LabVIEW C Code Generator, which generates C code from the LabVIEW block diagram. Embedded Module For ARM Quote Link to comment
PeterB Posted October 27, 2009 Report Share Posted October 27, 2009 It was an NI rep and the toolkit was "The Embedded Module for ARM Microcontrollers" This is what it says in the sales blarb: Shaun, Referring to this page, did the NI sales rep show you a Tier 1 or a Tier 2 evaluation board+device ? The Tier 1 devices apparently work "out of the box" - although that says nothing about UI configuration flexibility. BTW even if what you say is true re. the inflexibility of the UI vis, unfortunately I suspect there will be nothing on the NI site that explicitly says so. regards Peter Badcock Product Development ResMed Ltd Quote Link to comment
ShaunR Posted October 27, 2009 Report Share Posted October 27, 2009 Shaun, Referring to this page, did the NI sales rep show you a Tier 1 or a Tier 2 evaluation board+device ? The Tier 1 devices apparently work "out of the box" - although that says nothing about UI configuration flexibility. BTW even if what you say is true re. the inflexibility of the UI vis, unfortunately I suspect there will be nothing on the NI site that explicitly says so. regards Peter Badcock Product Development ResMed Ltd Well. the board had a 2 line LCD display so it must have been tier 1. It did work "out of the box"....... with the demos. And as long as you changed only the data to the front panels it was fine. But when I said that our device was to have a 12 line matrix display and how could I mod the "display" vi to do that, he said I'd have to write my own display driver in C. He did demonstrate compiling, downloading and live debugging with a demo he had prepared. But when I started asking him to modify it, he changed some settings and then it would pop-up with a window full of c code and he would twiddle bits. I pushed him on it and asked why he wasn't changing the vis. Thats when I looked inside and found....well nothing, apart from the controls and indicators. The vis seemed to be purely placeholders for the generator. Quote Link to comment
Rolf Kalbermatter Posted October 28, 2009 Report Share Posted October 28, 2009 Think about it! There is no other way to make this feasible possible. The Embedded development system simply converts the VIs to C code and compiles that with the C tool chain for the target system. Just as there are 10 C coders a penny there is one impressive C compiler that works for almost all hardware, namely gcc. NI could spend 100ds of man years and try to write a LabVIEW compiler engine for every possible embedded hardware target out there and they would not get anywhere. By converting everything into C and let gcc (or whatever tool-chain a specific embedded target comes with) deal with it, they can limit the development to a scope that is manageable. And of course the direct communication with hardware resources has to be dealt with in C somehow. There is simply no other way. The LabVIEW system can not possibly abstract the 10000 different hardware targets in such a way that you would not need to do that. On Windows you usually get away without since there are enormous driver suites such as DAQmx and many more that take care of the low level nitty gritty details like interrupts, registers, DMA, etc. On an embedded target that NI has at best had a board in their lab to work with this is not a feasible option. If you need out of the box experience you should not look at embedded hardware. You are anyhow not likely to use the development kit board in an end product so the out of box experience stops there already. A much better solution for out of box experience would be cRIO or maybe sRIO. Quote Link to comment
PeterB Posted October 28, 2009 Report Share Posted October 28, 2009 Think about it! Hi Rolf, thanks for chiming in. When NI tells me I will get an "out of the box' experience, I may be prepared to accept that it must work within certain limitations on how much of their H/W I can change without having to resort to C-code edits. Clearly the out of the box sol'n didn't extend to permitting a 'simple' increase in the no. of rows in the LCD matrix. That may be OK in my case, but it wasn't in Shaun's. Perhaps if one needed more display flexibility it would be worth looking into the ADI blackfin out of the box option. I guess this is why they offer the demo version for about 5% of the cost of the non-time limited version, it gives you a chance to see what is possible. I have always been aware that programming anything except the ARM7 or Cortex-M3 will require C-code editing. I have and can code C if I need to but I'd also need to evaluate all the tradeoffs such as development time/dev system cost/ease of modifications etc etc. regards Peter Badcock Product Development ResMed Ltd Quote Link to comment
ShaunR Posted October 28, 2009 Report Share Posted October 28, 2009 Think about it! There is no other way to make this feasible possible. The Embedded development system simply converts the VIs to C code and compiles that with the C tool chain for the target system. Just as there are 10 C coders a penny there is one impressive C compiler that works for almost all hardware, namely gcc. NI could spend 100ds of man years and try to write a LabVIEW compiler engine for every possible embedded hardware target out there and they would not get anywhere. By converting everything into C and let gcc (or whatever tool-chain a specific embedded target comes with) deal with it, they can limit the development to a scope that is manageable. And of course the direct communication with hardware resources has to be dealt with in C somehow. There is simply no other way. The LabVIEW system can not possibly abstract the 10000 different hardware targets in such a way that you would not need to do that. On Windows you usually get away without since there are enormous driver suites such as DAQmx and many more that take care of the low level nitty gritty details like interrupts, registers, DMA, etc. On an embedded target that NI has at best had a board in their lab to work with this is not a feasible option. If you need out of the box experience you should not look at embedded hardware. You are anyhow not likely to use the development kit board in an end product so the out of box experience stops there already. A much better solution for out of box experience would be cRIO or maybe sRIO. To me, its a bit like Codegear selling you Delphi and expecting you to do bits in Visual Basic. People like LV because it is not C. What they could have done is run a linux kernel on the ARM and then use the linux RTE or ported their RTOS which currently supports intel and Power PC. There arn't that many platforms out there that they support so I think for that price they could have made a bit more of an effort. Quote Link to comment
Rolf Kalbermatter Posted October 29, 2009 Report Share Posted October 29, 2009 To me, its a bit like Codegear selling you Delphi and expecting you to do bits in Visual Basic. People like LV because it is not C. What they could have done is run a linux kernel on the ARM and then use the linux RTE or ported their RTOS which currently supports intel and Power PC. There arn't that many platforms out there that they support so I think for that price they could have made a bit more of an effort. And that is where the problem starts. There are miriads of embedded developer toolkits with all their own choice of a longer or not so long list of hardware boards. ARM CPUs from NXP, Intel, Atmel, TI, Samsung, Motorola, Cirrus Logic, etc., Freescale's Coldfire and PowerPC CPUs, MIPS, Atmel AVR32, National Semiconductor, Hitachi SuperH, and each of these CPUs has their own on chip hardware selection of AI/AO, DIO, timers, ethernet, USB , serial, SPI, I2C, CAN, JTAG, display interfaces, security engines, etc. with very varying register programming interface even for the same functionality, not to forget about external components on the development board that extend the variation even more. Even if NI would license VxWorks or a similar OS for some of these CPU platforms (which they in fact do since the Embedded Toolkit makes use of the RT kernel that comes with the Keil Tools), this does still mean that they do not have board level drivers for all the possible hardware that is out there, not to speak about modifications that you might want to do to the development kit hardware for your own product such as replacing a 2 line display with a 12 line display. Such a change may seem trivial but often it involves not just the change of a variable somewhere but a completely different register set to be initialized and programmed. So I do not think that you can get much more out of the box currently How much LabVIEW embedded really solves a market demand is a different question. It can not possible guarantee you a LabVIEW only experience once you want to change even little things in the hardware design of the developer board that came with your kit, and that is what embedded design is often about. I doubt that many use the original developer board 1:1 in an end user product, so where I see its benefit is in prototyping and possible "one or a few of a kind" test scenarios where you can work with the hardware as it comes in the box, or at most only need to make very little changes to its external peripherial to reduce the work on C level to a minimum. While NI is selling the Embedded Toolkit as a LabVIEW product they make AFAIK no claims that you do not have to go to the C level once you start to make changes to the hardware, and even into the toolchain level if you want to adabt it to your own CPU and/or platform But for those a cRIO system would seem more beneficial to me. It's extra cost is not really an issue if you only are going to build one or a few of those systems. Quote Link to comment
jmarte Posted December 14, 2009 Report Share Posted December 14, 2009 QUOTE (Nighthunter @ Jul 19 2008, 07:21 AM) Thank you Nighthunter, would you please give me a link to this? I mean I have already bought the AT2440 dev board, it is as good as I thought, handy, steady, cool, it is performing perfect. however I still need another one that embodies GPRS connection. Could you guys recommend me one? QUOTE (Nighthunter @ Jul 19 2008, 07:21 AM) Thank you Nighthunter, would you please give me a link to this? I mean I have already bought the AT2440 dev board, it is as good as I thought, handy, steady, cool, it is performing perfect. however I still need another one that embodies GPRS connection. Could you guys recommend me one? Hi, Could you please talk us what labview software do you use t programming the AT2440, thanks Quote Link to comment
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