Whitepaper: LabVIEW a 1000m below sea level - the birth year of LabVIEW Embedded and the Zbrain Platform

[m.a.r.c.o]

It’s the year 2006 and we are on the Scandinavian west coast. An energy giant is planning to lay pipelines and extract gas on uneven seabed. In some places, the pipes are not even in contact with the seabed. Due to expected subsea currents, vibrations are expected here, so a measuring network is to monitor them continuously. The Norwegian technology company entrusted with this task is faced with high demands:

• a measuring network 1,000 meters below sea level,
• acoustic synchronization of six measuring nodes in milliseconds and
• six months of continuous operation...
• to be developed in just seven months!

In addition to a certain sense of adventure and the willingness to accept risks, this ambitious pipeline project requires a new way of thinking in product development in order to master the complexity and tight schedule. The deadline could not be met using traditional development methods, such as C/C++ on microcontrollers. A method must be found that abstracts the complexity of the application and the hardware as much as possible.

LabVIEW Embedded is chosen. A still young technology at that time. Schmid Elektronik is pulled into this project, because they have just proven the concept of LabVIEW Embedded as early adopters for their family of railway measurement products. Schmid accepts the subsea challenge and creates the required LabVIEW Embedded hardware and software that suits above requirements. 

In any case, the successful completion paves the way for Schmid Elektronik’s partnership with NI in 2007.

Concerns about the reliability of graphical programming with LabVIEW on embedded hardware are put to rest with this project and sparks a product idea: the Zbrain platform! This is still used today by numerous Schmid customers as a design and development accelerator. LabVIEW Embedded as the enabler of the platform later scaled from the C generator to Linux, multicore microcontrollers and FPGA.

After NI has lifted the EOL tag from the System-on-Module in 2023 and made it longterm available again, Schmid Elektronik decided to create this Swiss LabVIEW Embedded User Group to empower other users to leverage graphical programming of embedded systems.