Programming with the 2009 controller

[steveg]

Originally Posted by Russ Beavis

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).

It's true, and I think that that provides for some really interesting prototyping capabilities. One thing I haven't seen, though, is cost. Is LabView embedded royalty-free? If you're paying even a few $/processor that uses it, I can see how that would be a major detriment to the industry adopting it. I think there's a couple reasons why many people who develop microcontroller applications, would shy away from LV. If you're doing something more than just a simple task, it's really easy to become limited, by code size, core frequency, etc... and there's still the conception that things like LabView have a huge amount of overhead.

Also, maybe I've just hung out with old school developers, but none of them trust LabView, and I don't think they'd ever consider using it on a microcontroller. Don't get me wrong, LabView is great for a lot of applications, but I don't think their place is on a small embedded uC. Not yet, anyway.

As for the PSOC, it's a really interesting piece of hardware... Or rather, the development tools for it are interesting. There's some places where it could be really useful, but it doesn't seem like it's made the jump into industry yet. Back about a year ago, when I was starting my senior capstone project, guys from Cypress were pushing the PSOC pretty heavily. It seems like they're trying to target the college kids so that when they go out into industry they can say "hey, I know how to use this, and it would work in this application."