NI LabVIEW Real-Time Now Targets Wind River VxWorks RTOS

“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,” said Warren Kurisu, Director of Product Management at Wind River. “The combination of these technologies helps fulfill the DSO mandate by enabling engineers to move complicated designs faster through the design cycle and into deployment.”

Embedded and distributed applications in industries such as military and aerospace benefit from the small, rugged architecture of the CompactRIO platform. Using the processing speed of the Freescale Power Architecture technology and the dependability of Wind River VxWorks in the cRIO-9012 and cRIO-9014 controllers as well as the customisation of the Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA in the reconfigurable chassis, the CompactRIO platform provides engineers with 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, engineers can create custom hardware designs that target any 32-bit processor running VxWorks - which provides a comprehensive networking stack, enhanced memory protection and error management - with the LabVIEW Embedded Development Module.

The graphical programming approach of the LabVIEW Real-Time Module 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.