using Labview realtime module in RTAI

[amirsaman]

hello everyone,

i want to use Labview realtime module in RTAI for real time applications beacuse of it's free source and very good performance. is it possible to do this work?

if it is, can anyone introduce some same case study or something similar to this?

[Zach-H]

I'm not familiar with anyone using LabVIEW Real-Time Module to with a Real-Time operating system other than our Pharlap or VXworks based systems. It may be possible, but this wouldn't be officially supported by National Instruments. 

[rolfk · Accepted solution]

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@amirsaman wrote:

hello everyone,

i want to use Labview realtime module in RTAI for real time applications beacuse of it's free source and very good performance. is it possible to do this work?

if it is, can anyone introduce some same case study or something similar to this?

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I don't think that is possible for anyone outside NI. LabVIEW realtime supports at this time only Windows as development host and as target only National Instruments hardware with specifcally targeted OSes or the Pharlap ETS system on x86 systems with a somewhat specific hardware configuration. Using RTAI as target OS for LabVIEW realtime applications would require first some modifications to the LabVIEW realtime plugin to support this new platform.

Also none of the LabVIEW realtime files created for either the NI platforms running VxWorks or Pharlap OS, or the Pharlap ETS system woud be possible to get deployed to a RTAI system, as they are not compatible. You would in the first place have to port the whole slew of shared libraries that make up the realtime LabVIEW runtime system on one of these targets to your RTAI system which is basically a completely new LabVIEW target platform that you can only create with quite a bit of effort from the LabVIEW source code. It's not really impossible for NI as most of the LabVIEW code is written quite platform independently but it would be a combination of the compile settings for current LabVIEW realtime, with settings to produce LabVIEW VxWorks realtime targets with some extra Linux settings. Yet it would be by far not trivial and some of the parts are actually hardware specific drivers which have to be ported too, and limit the possibility of what RTAI hardware could be used even further. In short not something that would make any commercial sense to NI as they would have to invest a lot of resources without any possibility to sell extra hardware.

And hell is freezing up before NI releases LabVIEW source code in any form that would give non-NI employees access to it!