LabVIEW for BeagleBoard

[vitoi]

 

The BeagleBoard xM is a 32 bit ARM based microcontroller board that is 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 (or other methods of getting LabVIEW to run on it).

The BeagleBoard xM is $149 and is open hardware. The BeagleBoard xM uses an ARM Cortex A8 running at 1,000 MHz resulting in 2,000 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. So, about 33 times the processing power!

Wouldn’t it be great to programme the BeagleBoard xM 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.

[R_Beauchaine]

The 'LabVIEW everywhere' slogan seems to have gone by the wayside..

[Mark_Yedinak]

I would like to see LabVIEW simply support specific processor families, not specific boards. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to develop an entire product using LabVIEW and build it from the ground up?

[vitoi]

Once you've targeted a specific board, wouldn't the specific processor family also be supported? I tried to develop an entire product using LabVIEW and building it from the ground up. Then I realised how far behind LabVIEW Embedded for ARM has fallen. A bit of effort from NI and it can be resurrected. Let's hope.

[vitoi]

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@ R_Beauchaine wrote:

 The 'LabVIEW everywhere' slogan seems to have gone by the wayside..

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Let's bring it back!

[LuI]

This board is IMHO the most important to support as it has the power to fulfill a lot of jobs and can be adopted to those (costs, peripherals, power supply...) I don't know how NI could support it AND get its share, but it was really great...

[vitoi]

Lul,

When NI sells us LabVIEW on the desktop, what share does it get? We mainly use third party instruemnts and I'm sure NI makes money from our LabVIEW SSPs.

[GregFreeman]

Just had this request from a customer today.

[Darren]

This year we are introducing a free version of LabVIEW with support for third party hobbyist hardware. The LabVIEW Community Edition is currently in beta and can be used for non-commercial and non-academic applications. LabVIEW applications can be deployed and run headless on a BeagleBone Black or Raspberry Pi 3 or 4. Support is also included to use an Arduino Uno as a low-cost tethered data acquisition device. Software support has not been hard coded or otherwise restricted to these four devices, so while untested by National Instruments, other similar hardware targets may partially or fully function. Support for this hardware is provided by the LINX Toolkit, included with both LabVIEW (for commercial use) and LabVIEW Community Edition (for non-commercial use).

[Darren]

Available in LabVIEW 2020 Community Edition and later. The Community Edition includes the LINX Toolkit, which provides support for programming the BeagleBone Black.