Thread: Programming with the 2009 controller
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Unread 23-09-2008, 09:30
Russ Beavis Russ Beavis is offline
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Re: Programming with the 2009 controller
NI has been pushing their LabVIEW tools into the embedded world for a few years now and they really seem to be gaining traction. There are already cRIO and sbRIO solutions and you can even get a variant of LabVIEW called LabVIEW Embedded with ports for ColdFire, Blackfin and ARM on your own custom PCB (including the Luminary Micro controller in the new Jaguar motor controller).

Such high-level tools (eg LabVIEW, Matlab/Real-Time Workshop, UML) will never compete with machine code, assembly or C/C++ (or other similar text-based languages) in terms of code efficiency. However, a good engineer knows when to use which tools. Sometimes you need to partition a design team and leverage their individual capabilities (eg use a combination of languages with high-level state machine "programming" and low-level drivers for code size/speed). Sometimes you need to get a product out the door as quickly as possible (often made easier using high-level tools) and are willing to pay a few extra $ for a microcontroller with a little extra oomph.

Russ