National Instruments has extended its LabVIEW graphical programming environment to target Wind River’s VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS), which has been deployed in more than 350 million devices worldwide, including NI’s latest CompactRIO controllers. The NI cRIO-9012 and cRIO-9014 controllers combine the productivity of LabVIEW Real-Time and the reliability of the VxWorks device software, making it easy for engineers to design embedded systems.
“Our collaboration with National Instruments gives engineers both the high performance of VxWorks and the powerful, easy-to-use graphical programming tools of LabVIEW in a single development platform,” says Warren Kurisu, director of product management at Wind River.
Embedded and distributed applications can benefit from the small, rugged architecture of the CompactRIO platform, which provides a stand-alone system that can perform applications with maximum reliability in the harshest of environments. Engineers can use LabVIEW Real-Time to deploy their custom real-time applications on Wind River VxWorks 6.1 embedded in the cRIO-9012 and cRIO-9014 controllers. VxWorks delivers a highly scalable, real-time, deterministic run-time environment to systems based on CompactRIO. In addition, custom hardware designs can be created that target any 32-bit processor running VxWorks with the LabVIEW Embedded Development Module.
The graphical programming approach of LabVIEW Real-Time makes it easy for engineers to design real-time applications, using hundreds of algorithms for signal processing, machine vision, control, file I/O and networking, and deploy them to a suite of RTOSs and off-the-shelf, real-time hardware devices. LabVIEW Real-Time also features an Execution Trace Toolkit for optimising applications and meeting performance constraints as well as integration with the LabVIEW Simulation Module for quickly implementing model-based applications.
A new version of LabVIEW has been released for use with Windows Vista. NI LabVIEW 8.2.1 includes both the desktop development environment as well as related application software including the LabVIEW Real-Time and LabVIEW FPGA modules. NI has also released new 32-bit and 64-bit hardware drivers with support for the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista. For the first time, NI is offering PXI embedded controllers with Windows Vista pre-installed as the default operating system.