Labview for Control

Real time control is relative concept. My world real time is less than a
cycle. Computers running WINDOZE work in seconds or 10's of seconds
depending on what your doing and  how it is routed.

SQLit wrote:

Real-time control is not a relative concept.  Real-time is real-time.


If you describe it that way, then yes it becomes relative, because we
don't know what kind of cycle you're talking about.  A wash cycle?  A
lunar cycle?  A bicycle?  Sorry, that wasn't very funny....


As far as I know, Windows XP time slicing occurs at something like 10ms
intervals.

Strictly speaking, anything running on Windows cannot be considered
real-time because there is no guarantee of when processes will be
scheduled.  Although, for many applications, a desktop PC running
Windows is going to be way faster than necessary, so you could count on
it with a reasonable degree of confidence to get something done within
a set amount of time.

Anyway, to address the original poster's questions:

Yes, I use LabVIEW for real-time control.

Essentially, National Instruments offers three products for R/T
applications.  There is a PCI card you can get that has a real-time
computer on it (I didn't have much success with this product).  There
is the ruggedized PXI hardware, which might be more than you're looking
for.  And then there is the LabVIEW R/T ETS for desktop operating
system that you can install on a regular desktop PC (there are a few
requirements, I think it has to be a Pentium 4 and have a specific kind
of NIC, maybe a couple other things).  This is what I've been using for
my application, and it works quite well.

As for special hardware, it depends on the requirements of your
project.  I'm using an FPGA card in the R/T computer for doing I/O.

Hopefully that helps.
---
Colby

Colby wrote:


having seen the NI guys at my place of work during theweek I was interested
in the CompactRIO systems that they are now producing. The whole aim of
this product is to remove the "Real Time" requirements from the software
running on the PC and move it into specialised hardware able to cope with
and meet the scheduling demands of the application. With a programmable
FPGA on-board the unit as well there is a lot of scope for tailoring the
device to ones needs. The only thing that let's the product down is that
you will still need additional signal conditioning hardware as the units
are not robust enough in some of the application areas we have in mind for
them. The main reason I stick with bespoke embedded systems I suppose.


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Paul E. Bennett wrote:

How did you make out with the recalcitrant stepper?

Jerry
--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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Colby wrote:

That's not entirely true.  I've designed a real-time control systems on
Windows XP with no problem.  You simply have to make the control loop
(or whichever loop in your application needs to be realtime) the
highest priority in the application, and then run the executable with a
windows priority of "real time".  This will force EVERYTHING running on
Windows to take a back-seat to your application.

Loban wrote:


So, does that hold for sub-millisecond events requiring context switching
latency in the few usec region? I think not. There are some control
problems that can only be solved by carefuly designed embedded hardware
solutions specific to the task. The Windowy environments for user
interfaces in such systems only adjust the control parameters and do not
take part in the inner control loop.

--
********************************************************************
Forth based HIDECS Consultancy .....<http://www.amleth.demon.co.uk/>
Mob: +44 (0)7811-639972
Tel: +44 (0)1235-811095
Going Forth Safely ..... EBA. www.electric-boat-association.org.uk..
********************************************************************

This is only true if you are writing in kernel mode.
For user mode programming, this doesn't hold.
Even if you assign a user-mode process & thread REALTIME priority,
if you move the mouse or press a key, or write to the disk, these
hardware devices still take priority.