Embedded System on PC/104

[geoff]

Hello All

First off, I am very sorry if this topic has been covered in previous discussions, I have tried had a look through and have not been able to find much mention on this.

Basically I am very new to labview so again, I'm very sorry if this is a simply answered question.

I am looking to use a PC104 as a realtime controller for a robotic system. However, I do not know whether all modules from a PC104 are compatible with labview. From my understanding a PC104 is simply a small computer and the deployment would be the same as deployment on a desktop (given that it meets the hardware requirements). But there are modules that you can buy, which do analouge and digital I/O. These would be pretty crucial to the success of the system... but I cannot find out whether these modules are supported by labview RT. The closest I got was discovering that you could address inputs and outputs to these boards through labview itself... but would this depend on the boards manufacturer? I had a look at one manufactuer who offered drivers, but when I contacted them to confirm, they told me that they do not support labview anymore.

As it's a university project with labview only just being recently purchased, they are looking to buy the PC104 and licenses for me to do this... which is nice of them.. but I dont want to be in a position where all the equipment turns up and it isn't compatible.

Also if anybody has experience with PC104 and labview, could they recommend a manufacturer? I am a bit lost....

Thank you

Geoff

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

QUOTE (geoff @ Jan 28 2009, 03:36 PM)

Hello All

First off, I am very sorry if this topic has been covered in previous discussions, I have tried had a look through and have not been able to find much mention on this.

Basically I am very new to labview so again, I'm very sorry if this is a simply answered question.

I am looking to use a PC104 as a realtime controller for a robotic system. However, I do not know whether all modules from a PC104 are compatible with labview. From my understanding a PC104 is simply a small computer and the deployment would be the same as deployment on a desktop (given that it meets the hardware requirements). But there are modules that you can buy, which do analouge and digital I/O. These would be pretty crucial to the success of the system... but I cannot find out whether these modules are supported by labview RT. The closest I got was discovering that you could address inputs and outputs to these boards through labview itself... but would this depend on the boards manufacturer? I had a look at one manufactuer who offered drivers, but when I contacted them to confirm, they told me that they do not support labview anymore.

As it's a university project with labview only just being recently purchased, they are looking to buy the PC104 and licenses for me to do this... which is nice of them.. but I dont want to be in a position where all the equipment turns up and it isn't compatible.

Also if anybody has experience with PC104 and labview, could they recommend a manufacturer? I am a bit lost....

Thank you

Geoff

LabVIEW realtime is running on either the Pharlap ETS or VxWorks for PPC. VxWorks for PPC is out of question since NI does not support using that on non NI hardware and your system will most likely be an x86 based CPU.

So in theory you could use the Pharlap (now I think called Ardence) ETS system on your hardware. In practice this is quite difficult though. Pharlap ETS as used by LabVIEW RT has specific requirements to the employed hardware such as supporting only certain chipsets and especially ethernet controllers. So you will have to really confirm with some NI specialist that your intended hardware (don't expect them to specify a PC-104 system for you as they do rather sell their own hardware) will be compatible in all aspects. Expect to be able to tell them exactly about chipsets and low level details of your system. Telling them just that you have a PC104 system xyz from vendor abc will not help as they will not be going to spend much time to try to find out all those low level details themselves. There is also a thorough list of specs somewhere on the NI site of what a hardware platform must consist of to be able to install and use Pharlap ETS on it.

Be aware that since you are not using NI hardware you will also need to purchase the Pharlap ETS runtime license, that comes included with any NI hardware.

If you have been gone through all this, confirmed that it will run and installed everything the next challenge will be the inclusion of your analog and digital IO. I can understand that a vendor does not feel about supporting LabVIEW RT very much since the potential volume especially for PC104 hardware is very small and the effort not. Writing your own drivers even when using just inport and outport will be a true challenge and since you would be using it with inport and outport you should not expect high speed data acquisition of any sorts. For reading and writing digital IO and single analog values it will work but forget about timed data acquisition. For that you need real drivers in the form of DLLs that can run on the Pharlap ETS system. And if you get that DLL you will need to get also a stub DLL for Windows exporting the same functions that do nothing in order to be able to develop on your host system the VIs that call that DLL.

All in all this might be an interesting project to do if you have lots of time and/or the potential money saving by using this hardware instead of NI hardware pays off because you are going to deploy this system many thousand times. But even then you should check out NI hardware because if you are going to talk about such numbers they will be happy to come up with quite competitive offers.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[Neville D]

I know this doesn't help much, but I remember reading about some University project running LV on PC104 with some specific plug in DAQ modules.. maybe the modules were from Boston Engineering?

Try searching Boston Engg. on the NI site. I think they had a paper at NI-WEEK 08.

Neville.

[eatherto]

Hey guys,

Boston Engineering does have a compact control solution that we have used in our own robots, it's called the FlexStack:

http://boston-engineering.com/index.php?op...7&Itemid=44

The FlexStack has DAQ boards that can be purchased and added to the stack. It is not based on the PC-104 bus structure, we created our own bus. Because of this, the FlexStack has a smaller footprint than a PC-104 stack. The FlexStack is 2.5" x 2.5".

Since the FlexStack uses a Blackfin processor, you will need to use either LabVIEW Embedded for Blackfin or program in C with VisualDSP++.

Hope that helped.

Thanks,

Eric

[JustinThomas]

I remember at NI Week 07 a bunch of college students did show a robot programmed using NI RT based on a PC/104 platform. The following is the link I found on this

http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/romela/