LabVIEW for Arduino Due

[vitoi]

The Arduino Due is a 32 bit ARM based microcontroller board that is destined to be very popular. It would be great if we could programme it in LabVIEW. This product could leverage off the already available LabVIEW Embedded for ARM and the LabVIEW Microcontroller SDK.

The Arduino Due is currently in developer trials and is due out later this year. It is expected to be about $50 and is open hardware. The ARM chip is an Atmel SAM3X8E ARM Cortex M3 running at 84 MHz resulting in 100 MIPS of performance. By way of comparison, the current LabVIEW Embedded for ARM Tier 1 (out-of-the-box experience) boards have only 60 MIPS of processing power.

The Arduino brand has an enormous following and Google has selected the Arduino Due for their recently introduced (28 June 2012) Accessory Development Kit for Android mobile phones and tablets (the ADK2012).

(By the way, the currently-available LabVIEW Arduino toolkit does not target the Arduino (and couldn’t since the Arduino Uno uses only an 8 bit microcontroller). Instead there is fixed C code running on the Arduino to transfer peripheral information to the serial port and back. That is, none of the LabVIEW target code executes on the Arduino. This idea is for LabVIEW code developed on a desktop to be transferred and execute on the target Arduino Due.)

Wouldn’t it be great to programme the Arduino Due in LabVIEW?

[vitoi]

I’ve posted four separate ideas for different microcontroller boards that LabVIEW could target:

1)    LabVIEW for Raspberry Pi

2)    LabVIEW for Arduino Due

3)    LabVIEW for BeagleBoard

4)    LabVIEW for LM3S9D96 Development Kit

I’ve tried to identify popular, capable boards that have a likely long life. Some will be more popular than others and some would be easier for National Instruments to develop as LabVIEW targets.

Hopefully NI will score these boards (and any others of interest) something like:

    Score = Popularity / Effort

where Popularity is the number of kudos (and perhaps other indicators) and Effort is how much development effort it would take NI to develop a “Tier 1” board. For those unfamiliar with the term “Tier 1” it is used by LabVIEW Embedded for ARM to identify boards that work out-of-the-box. That is, you can start programming in LabVIEW straight away. There are currently only two Tier 1 boards but these are getting a bit old and are not as powerful as more contemporary offerings.

I’m not proposing NI makes all four boards a Tier 1 board, but chose the one with the highest score. I think it will do wonders for LabVIEW popularity (and sales) and our productivity.

[LuI]

I'd really love to program the Arduino Due with LabVIEW. But finally the license conditions are important as well. NI should consider a license fee that covers both small 'hobby'-like projects and higher-volume consumer projects. For hobby projects the license should not cost (much) more than the hardware. And for larger projects one r the other 'flatrate' license should be available

[zander_zone]

The best idea would be a RTE running on Linux / ARM. Then BSP support is the board provider's task.

BR,

Paul Grosshart

[El_Tipo]

I think it would be a great idea to be able to embed code into the arduino or any other micro controller.

I just inquired about the price for the LV C generator and it is $15k.

There should be (in my opinion) a more inexpensive variant for achiving this.

[vitoi]

Forget the LabVIEW C generator. Frightfully expensive and a lot of work to set up and configure your microcontroller. LabVIEW Embedded for ARM is the one-click solution, but it's $10,000. However, it has been suggested by falkpl that if LabVIEW Embedded for ARM was folded into LabVIEW (desktop) on a revenue neutral basis, it would add less than $5 to the price of LabVIEW (desktop). My quick calculation would be that it would add less than $1! Who would;t pay an extra $1 (or $5) for LabVIEW and get the ability to target a couple of microcontroller development boards. Would do more to increase the popularity of LabVIEW than any other idea on the forum. And there's no development effort. Just some marketing courage.

[vitoi]

The release date for the much anticipated Arduino Due was finally announced at the Maker Faire New York a coupe of days ago. The release date is 22nd October 2012. The price is $49.

An 32-bit Arduino should open up a lort more applications and introduce more people to the exciting world of microcontrollers. Not sure if NI is interested in a slice of the pie.

[vitoi]

The Arduino Due has now been released. Details at http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardDue . Price is $49.

It's quite an exciting board with 12 x 12 bit ADC, 2 x 12 bit DAC, DMA, USB OTG (separate to USB for programming/debugging), multitasking libraries and the list goes on. It's been a long time from announced to release, but this board is destined to revolutionize microcontroller programming. Will NI join the revolution?

[James_McN]

Wow not seen one of those before. I have got a freesoc board on the way which me and a colleague are hoping to program through the ARM module. This looks like another good candidate (if programmable through keil tools) and I don't believe there is any reason we cant post the support online when we do. 

With regards to rolling this up into LabVIEW I don't think this would happen for a couple of reasons.Firstly we have always maintained hardware target support in add on modules. I am not involved in marketing so cannot comment on the actual need for this but I suspect people feel like they are then paying for features they don't use, even if it does roll up into a small sum. 

The other problem is more practical. The ARM module cross compiles through Keil tools which we distribute with the module, I suspect this would mean there is fixed base cost per install that would not make this possible. 

[jchalo99]

Ok, i see not much work has been done on this. I have access to labview with the Embedded for ARM modual. I am planning once i can barrow that computer to port the reuired applications over. i see there is actualy some people interested. i will try to keep updated on reddit and here. i got my due yesterday, i am hopefully going to start porting over on sunday. it doesnt seem TOO Complicated. my problem is that i know the processor is supported but i dont know much about microcontrollers. I can do basic C++ and Labview. im hopeing that most of the work is done already, like where the ram is, what interupts are, and how to manipulate the ports.

[vitoi]

Good luck jchalo99. Any activity in this area is good.