PC Meets Mac- LabVIEW

Restarting this project is timely for me as last summer I got together with a guy called PJ at National Instruments and we chatted about the upcoming release of LabVIEW Embedded Module for ARM Microcontrollers that enables embedded software development using the LabVIEW graphical programming environment on ARM MCUs. If you have a generation 2 Lego Mindstorms robotics kit the programming environment in that is a cut down version of LabVIEW and the microcontroller that controls your robotic creations is ARM-based. (Note to wife: Remember I have a birthday in July)

Over lunch in Austin back in July I told him about the LogStick project and he reckoned it would be a great project to demonstrate how easy it would be to create a real embedded application using LabVIEW. Time passed and suddenly the Embedded Systems Conference 2008 in San Jose was upon us with the imminent launch of the LabVIEW for Embedded Module for ARM Microcontrollers. National Instruments and ARM put together a joint presentation for PJ and me at the conference to present the two different approaches to creating the LogStick and show how easy it was with LabVIEW. And boy was it easy! Despite having not really talked since August about the project and only having my blog to go on, PJ successfully put together a most impressive demo of how the LogStick could be created using LabVIEW in what I reckon was a matter of a few hours.

So I am I going to take PJ’s design and say “The End”? Certainly not! There are a number of pro’s and con’s to both approaches and I like using the software tools I have to explore and drive the nitty-gritty of the MCU rather than have all that done for me. Now if I was trying to ship a product by Christmas that wasn’t so very cost sensitive it would be a different story. However, I think my approach will make the design slightly more efficient and for a cost sensitive device that is all important.

The photo at the top is a mockup of a typical user measuring wind speed with the LogStick I used during the presentation. The LogStick is a mockup not the user.