Running third party code on RT

[Taylor.Kendall]

We are in the process of developing a new product line, and we don’t have the time or hardware to do all of the software development ourselves. So we are considering farming some of the work out to a developer who has experience with this particular application. Specifically would like to have them to design the real time control loop for our hardware, what would essentially be a specialized PID controller. The developer we have found is willing to do this on the condition that we don’t see his source code (understandable), his code is in C++. 

We have been trying to think of the best way to interface his C++ with our LabView architecture. My first thought was to just get him a copy of LabView and he could make a VI with a formula node, and password protect it. We also thought about having him make a dll which we could reference. We will need something that will run on a LV 8.6.1 RT machine. 

Has anybody done something similar to this in the past?  Are there other ways to interface black box code into LabView?

Thanks for your advice.

[viScience]

For Vxworks, check out this document

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/5694

Just curious, what is so special about your PID control

that you cannot use the NI PID toolkit or the

System Identification Toolkit which can easily do adaptive control.

That way you could own the rights to your code.

[Taylor.Kendall]

I just used PID as a sort of example; our application would be similar in the way that it would be handled within RT control architecture.  We would be doing data acquisition, control output and some other unrelated processes in parallel with this algorithm.  The system we are attempting to control we have no relevant experience with, we believe it has enough non-linearity and other unique characteristics that designing and testing (mostly testing, this is something we don’t want to have to do testing and recoding in front of the customer during startup) is not an option.

[crelf]

Is there a reason you're not using a resource that is willing to write the code in LabVIEW?  ...and give it to you as part of the contract?  If not, you should contact www.viengineering.com - we have several RT engineers with deep math skills.

[Taylor.Kendall]

We are using this person because they have many years experience doing controls for this type of hardware, and bringing them on the do the programming is the only way to break into this feild.  Additionally we support some other product lines, which are currently stretching our staff too thin to run a full R&D program to learn how to do this new stuff.