LabVIEW for Raspberry Pi

[vitoi]

The recently introduced Raspberry Pi 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 Raspberry Pi is a $35 (with Ethernet) credit card sized computer that is open hardware. The ARM chip is an Atmel ARM11 running at 700 MHz resulting in 875 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 15 times the processing power!

Wouldn’t it be great to programme the Raspberry Pi in LabVIEW?

[Tom_Hawkins]

I'm eagerly awaiting my Raspberry Pi and would love to be able to program it in LabVIEW. I've given this idea my vote. The Pi has already been staggeringly successful so the potential market is huge, although I think most people who have bought one would only be willing to pay a small amount, if anything, for LabVIEW. Even a cut-down version - maybe with community-only support? - would be fantastic to have though.

A minor point though: I don't know if the Raspberry Pi can be described as 'open hardware' when Broadcom do not release the full details of the system-on-chip that powers it. Others have suggested that this might limit the commercial applications of the board as an embedded controller.

[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.

[vitoi]

Hi tmh,

Of the four boards I've mentioned, yes the Raspberry Pi is the most closed. However, the software apparently is open and the schematics have been released and the intention is to go open hardware (http://www.element14.com/community/thread/17870). As you mentioned, the Broadcom chip is closed so that is a limitation.

While the other three boards lend themselves to having the relevant portions cut and pasted into your design, if that's the way you want to go, the Raspberry Pi is different. At $25 or $35 dollars and it's credit card size, you might as well consider it as the "chip" for your bigger design and just plug it in.

The Raspberry Pi si the oddest of the bunch from the point of view of price, likely popularity, size, mixed open/closed nature and probability of NI targeting it. The other 3 microcontroller development boards are certainly open everything.

Regards,

Vito

[zander_zone]

We are seriously considerly porting LabVIEW applications to C to use ARM for the cost advantage. Having a RTE for ARM would stop me. Look at Boundary Devices Nitrogen6X Board, there will be versions that are a SOM.

BR,

Paul Grosshart

[SimpiC]

I've got my Raspberry Pi and like many other users thought that it would be neat if we could port LabVIEW applications to it using the LabVIEW Embedded module but after a day of searching it seems that there are two showstoppers.  The first is that the Keil uVISION tool chain doesn't support ARM11 processors (the Pi has a ARM1176JZFS SoC) and the second is that the uLINK2 JTAG adapater isn't compatible with the RPi GPIO pinouts.

I'm sure that with the right effort LabVIEW applications could be run on the RPi but it's not going to be an easy ride.

regards

Simon Carter

[vitoi]

SimpiC, would you like to see LabVIEW programming on your Raspberry Pi? If so, voting for this idea is a good first step. After all, this exchange is a means of gauging customers' expression of interest.

As far as implementation goes, rather than use the LabVIEW Embedded for ARM, an option would be the LabVIEW Microprocessor SDK, which can target any 32 bit micro. Alternatively, the same method that was used to port LabVIEW to the compactRIO real-time controllers can be used. My preference is for the first method since it doesn't need the bulky run-time engine.

Of the four LabVIEW for Raspberry Pi / Arduino Due / Beagleboard / DK-LM3S9D96 options, the Raspberry Pi would be the hardest to implement. It's also the most popular. What a dilemma!

Looking forward to at least one of these being implemented by NI. There's certainly a lot of interest.

[pRoFiT]

I have a raspberry pi and would love for this to work. My question is: do you want full front panel operations to work with it or would RealTime engine be enough? How hard would it be to have RT run on the raspberry pi? Not sure what it could do with only having RT. Not like it has CRIO connnections or FPGA backplane. But maybe serial port comunication...You could try to implement some RT GPIO controls on the raspberry pi.

VxWorks runs on ARM11. Someone should port it over to work with raspberry pi. 🙂

[vitoi]

Congratulation Raspberry Pi. Over 100 kudos in under a month. That's a phenomenal LabVIEW community interest.

What will NI do with this phenomenal LabVIEW customer interest? Will it give us what we want?

[vitoi]

WTF, does this mean that there is a LabVIEW/Raspberry Pi product to be announced on 20th November? Take a look at http://uk.ni.com/nidays/keynote

[Taylor.Kendall]

I could see hooking up a USB daq device and having the RasberryPi act as a more flexable version of a PLC in some sort of distribuited system, maybe with a RT-Desktop, HMI or CRIO as a master controller.  

It would fill a massive hole in the NI product line that sits between wirelesss IO cards and powerful/expensive systems like CRIO and PXI.  There are so many good USB cards that I use in many applictaions but this would just make them so stupidly useful that I would squee.  

Then we would have the problem of getting enouh RasberryPi's but that will hopefully solve itself over time.