Benchmark the graph speed on PDAs

[chilly_charly]

I plan to invest in a PDA, and I need to have the best drawing speed.

Could you run the attached test on your own PDA and post the results here ?

Don't forget to include the model name !  😉

Thanks for your help !

[tst]

On an HP IPAQ 4150 with PocketPC2003 (winCE 4.2) this takes about 1.6-1.8 seconds (after trying roughly 10 times).

This model is considered to be fairly good when it comes to multimedia (it has a bright and good screen and a fairly good speaker), so this may play into it.

[chilly_charly]

Thanks Tst !

On an ACER n50, it takes 0.97 s.

Surprizingly, after playing a while with the PDA, the time rose to  3.6 / 5.4 s ! Back to 0.97 after a reset...

[tst]

Additionally, you should consider the fact the the OS version, what you're already running and the LV version (?) also affect the performance.

I have noticed that once I run one of my programs which does something all the time (even if it has a wait of 100-1000 ms), especially updating the display, the PDA becomes very sluggish if I try to switch to other programs and if I run 2 programs at the same time there are serious performance problems even if I don't try to switch tasks. This only seems to happen with my programs. I can run excel, word and so on at the same time without a problem.

[Bob_Y.]

I built it with LabVIEW 8.0 (just installed the PDA stuff yesterday!).  A Dell Axim X51V with Windows Mobile 5.0 gave a time of 2.5 sec for a first run and 1.8 for subsequent runs. 

Hope that this helps,

Bob Young

[chilly_charly]

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Bob Y. a écrit: I built it with LabVIEW 8.0 (just installed the PDA stuff yesterday!).  A Dell Axim X51V with Windows Mobile 5.0 gave a time of 2.5 sec for a first run and 1.8 for subsequent runs. 

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Aarrggh ! The Axim is presented as one of the fastest PDA, with a dedicated processor to handle the display. And it is two times slower than the Acer ???

So where is the bottleneck ? PDA technology or LabVIEW ? The PDA handwriting tool appears to be at least one order of magnitude faster than the LabVIEW picture example...

[EdDickens]

I was surprised at it's slow speed as well. I asked Bob to try it. The X51V has it's own video accelerator with 16MB RAM on a true VGA display with a 624MHz Intel XScale processor.

Could be new OS on the Axim. The X51 series ships with Windows Mobile 5 and there have been problems that both Dell and MS are suposed to be working on. Maybe the MS Embedded tools arn't optimized for the new OS yet.

Maybe it's just not as good as the specs make it out to be.

Ed

[Bob_Y.]

Chilly Charly,

This is the first application that I have built and downloaded onto this PDA.  Both it and LabVIEW 8.0's PDA stuff are new.  How would I go about figuring out if it is a hardware thing, the newer OS, or different LabVIEW version that is causing it to be slower than you expected?

Bob Young

[chilly_charly]

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Bob Y. a écrit: This is the first application that I have built and downloaded onto this PDA.  Both it and LabVIEW 8.0's PDA stuff are new.  How would I go about figuring out if it is a hardware thing, the newer OS, or different LabVIEW version that is causing it to be slower than you expected?

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Hey ! I was not complaining about your work ! Don't feel guilty about the "poor" performances of LV or PDAs ! I am really grateful that you spent time and efforts helping me (and our community...) to have a better sight of PDA possibilities !

I'm just amazed and disappointed by the slow display rate. I'm sure that the same program run much faster on my old 500 MHz PC.

And this is not the only issue : no scroll, no zoom... Again the graphic capabilities of LV, the only serious G language, seems to be out of phase... This is something that had to be said one more time... Even if I must admit that I would not be able to run anything on a PDA or any other machine without LV...

[EdDickens]

Maybe it's due to Windows Mobile 5.

I found this KB article stating that the PDA module for LV 7.1 and 8.0 both support WM5 through the eVC++ 4 and the WM 2003 SDK, but does not support all the features available in WM5. Maybe the video accelerator and VGA graphics is part of that?

There is an SDK for WM5, but it only works with MS Visual Studio 2005, but that does not work with LabVIEW.

Maybe some one at NI can explain a bit more what we're missing with the 2003 SDK on WM5.

Ed