LINX 3.0 - LabVIEW for BeagleBone Black and Raspberry Pi 2/3

[Kristoff2]

Any 2014 SP1 on Windows will work.

-Sam K

[kittentronic]

That's brilliant news - the only downside I can see is that it eliminates the incentive I previously had to get to work on my marketable Python skills in order to do anything useful on the Pi 😉

[altenbach]

I noticed easiy an order of magntiitude increase in loop rate for each device (arduino(~500) < BBB (~5000) < Pi(~50000)). Is this an indication of raw computing power or more of some design differences.

[Yamaeda]

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@altenbach wrote:

I noticed easiy an order of magntiitude increase in loop rate for each device (arduino(~500) < BBB (~5000) < Pi(~50000)). Is this an indication of raw computing power or more of some design differences.

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That should mainly be hardware. Arduino (Uno) is a 16MHz cpu while Pi3 is a 1GHz ARM.

/Y

[altenbach]

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@Yamaeda wrote:

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@altenbach wrote:

I noticed easiy an order of magntiitude increase in loop rate for each device (arduino(~500) < BBB (~5000) < Pi(~50000)). Is this an indication of raw computing power or more of some design differences.

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That should mainly be hardware. Arduino (Uno) is a 16MHz cpu while Pi3 is a 1GHz ARM.

/Y

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Yes, that much I understood. I was mostly interested in the 10x difference between BBB and Pi. Both are 1GHz.

[Kristoff2]

RPI 2/3 is Quad Core, BBB is single core.

The LINX API is also designed to favor 'user experience' over performance (sort of like the Arduino API).  There is a lot of checking and error handling that requires CPU time so the CPU is probably more of a limiting factor than the actual hardware peripheral.

We've been talking about ideas for an 'advanced' API that gives more direct access to the hardware but  'at your own risk' .

-Sam K

[altenbach]

I assume that the actual IO is not parallelized, but I guess the other cores can take care of all the other things, giving less distraction (thread switching, etc) to the core doing the LabVIEW work. A factor of 10 is significant.

The Pi is lacking any kind of AI and AO but that can be added with a few dollars worth of external gadgets. (e.g. this or this). How easy are these to incorporate into the software? (Sorry, I am quite new to this...:D).

[Kristoff2]

Both of those add-ons communicate over I2C so they should be pretty easy to integrate using the LINX I2C VIs.  It also looks like they are both 3.3v compatible so that means you won't need to mess around with a level shifter (both the Pi and BBB are 3.3v).   It would really just be a matter of sitting down with the chip data sheet for each of those to figure out what commands to send and then building up some nice Open - Read/Write - Close VI wrappers to make your life easier down the road.

I'm sure you won't be the only one working on adding stuff like this, so make sure to share if you get something working!

-Sam K

[altenbach]

I think the main remaining issue is that I need up to -10..+10V on both the AI and AO, so that seems to requires extra circuitry. I'll stick with RIO (sb, c, etc.) for now. 😄

[evandrorech]

Hi!

The runtime on the board supports VISA? It is possible to deploy LINX VIs to comunicate with remote boards over the UART or Ethernet? That way it would be possible to expand the I/O (digital and analog) using Arduino or Chipkit.

My other questions are: This system supports network shared variables and the timed loops can be allocated per processor and has a resolution of microseconds?

I installed it, but I currently use the LabVIEW 2015... I was very curious as to the operation and I plan to acquire a RPI to explore the functions!

Thanks!