Ideas in Wiring

LabVIEW Embedded Chips

The LabVIEW Embedded Development Module continues to win awards. A demo with the LabVIEW running on a Freescale ColdFire processor at the Freescale Technology Forum won "Best In Class Development Tools" by a panel of 4 industry folks. Wow.

So that brings me to some interesting trivia. I made a list of the various places that the LabVIEW EDM has run on (that I know about). Some are silly, some are amazing, but I find all of it cool

• A Linksys WRT54G Router (Broadcom MIPS/Linux) - my first little project. It did everything, build, run, debug and even TCP/IP I/O. I got it to control a GPIB-Enet box and a scope.
  
• Intel IXP425 Eval Board (Intel XScale 425/VxWorks) - one of the shipping examples
• Axiom CMD565 (Freescale PowerPC 565/eCos) - one of the shipping examples
• Axiom CMD565 (Freescale PowerPC 565/VxWorks) - one of the shipping examples
• Axiom CMD566 (PowerPC 566/VxWorks) - This board has Ethernet so we use it for training
• Xilinx ML403 Eval Board - (PowerPC/VxWorks) - This was demoed at NIWeek last year. It uses the PowerPC hard core inside a Xilinx Virtex II Pro.
  
• Embedded Planet EP405 board - (PowerPC405/Linux) - This was in the embedded planet booth at NIWeek last year
  
• Freescale HC08 Eval Board (HC08/no os) - One of our engineers did a power window controller for a car door. He integrated the Freescale ProcessorExpert for I/O and had it all working in a couple k of code (2k?). It didn't debug, do any arrays, or anything fancy but it was neat to see how small we could go.
• Freescale HC12 Eval Board (HC12/no os) - Look for this at NIWeek this year. Get some M&Ms in the process
  
• Altera NIOS II Dev Kit - (NIOS/eCos) - NIOS is a soft processor that runs in an Altera FPGA
• Phytec LPC229x (ARM7/eCos) - A new example target
• TI DSK6713 (TI TMS320C6713/DSP BIOS) - A university professor tried it first but we went and did it again as a new example target for those of you who want to program a DSP
• Nintendo Gameboy (Linux) - this was the robot from Charmed Labs that you saw on stage at NIWeek two years ago.
• PC Motherboard (80486/QNX) - your standard PC, but running the QNX operating system. It even can support an M-series DAQ card. Look for it in an NIWeek presentation.
• A Linksys WRT54G Router (Broadcom MIPS/Linux) - my first little project. It did everything, build, run, debug and even TCP/IP I/O. I got it to control a GPIB-Enet box and a scope.
• Intel IXP425 Eval Board (Intel XScale 425/VxWorks) - one of the shipping examples
• Axiom CMD565 (Freescale PowerPC 565/eCos) - one of the shipping examples
• Axiom CMD565 (Freescale PowerPC 565/VxWorks) - one of the shipping examples
• Axiom CMD566 (PowerPC 566/VxWorks) - This board has Ethernet so we use it for training
• EP405 (PowerPC405/MontaVista Linux) - Same board as before but running MontaVista Hard Hat Linux rather than the non-deterministic standard Linux distro.
• PC Motherboard (80486/MontaVista Linux) - Once you have Linux running, LV Embedded works pretty well on any CPU.
• Freescale MCF523x (Coldfire/no os) - A customer wanted to give this a try
• Freescale MCF5329 Eval Board (ColdFire 5329/uCLinux) - The winning demo at Freescale Technology Forum.
• Freescale 5200LITE (PowerPC/Linux) - A customer had one of these kicking around to try.
• Renesas SH7751 (SH4/QNX) - another experiment with our friends at QNX
• Atmel ATMega 128/no os - Details are sketchy but an academic customer put this together and is writing a paper on it.
• The Bluetechnix tinyboard, the HandyBoard, Scmidt Engineering Z-Brain, and the ADI EZ Kits using the LabVIEW Embedded Blackfin module.

Whew. I'll bet there are others kicking around that I forgot or I don't yet know about. The breadth is fantastic, from 8-bit to 32-bit. From no-os to Linux.

posted by Joel @ 11:09 AM