LabVIEW for Raspberry Pi

[vitoi]

The recently introduced Raspberry Pi is a 32 bit ARM based microcontroller board that is very popular. It would be great if we could programme it in LabVIEW. This product could leverage off the already available LabVIEW Embedded for ARM and the LabVIEW Microcontroller SDK (or other methods of getting LabVIEW to run on it).

The Raspberry Pi is a $35 (with Ethernet) credit card sized computer that is open hardware. The ARM chip is an Atmel ARM11 running at 700 MHz resulting in 875 MIPS of performance. By way of comparison, the current LabVIEW Embedded for ARM Tier 1 (out-of-the-box experience) boards have only 60 MIPS of processing power. So, about 15 times the processing power!

Wouldn’t it be great to programme the Raspberry Pi in LabVIEW?

[be]

NI open your ears ... Just do it !

[vitoi]

be, your changes of getting this, are like buying a lottery ticket. You have a slightly greater chance of winning if you kudos/vote for it 🙂

[Murph]

We just got our pi and are checking it out. Using LabVIEW to program this thing would be a solution I have been looking at for years!

We'll see what happens.

[Brandyn]

I hope NI provides a means to target and not charge an arm and a leg for it.

[vitoi]

Wow, over 200 votes in under 4 months. It will be interesting to see what National Instruments does with this overwhelming customer request.

There's a presentation by Dr. Robert Mullins, Co-Founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, at the UK NI Days on 20th November 2012 ( http://uk.ni.com/nidays/keynote ). If NI have been working on something then this would be a good time to announce it.

Of course, the fizzler approach would be to do what has been done with the LabVIEW Interface for Arduino Toolkit, where there is some fixed code running on the Arduino that provides a communication bridge with the Arduino's peripherals to LabVIEW running on a desktop. This was OK for the Arduino since it is only an 8 bit micro, but not the way to go for Raspberry Pi (or Arduino Due).

NI has some exciting possibilities in the embedded space. Technically they can do it, but marketing are so scared of cannibalizing RIO sales that they will do even more damage to the NI share price, which is down 20.6% relative to the Nasdaq so far this year! That's down 25.3% on an annualized basis. That's significant for NI management, NI employees, NI investors and, most importantly, people like us that rely on NI products to earn a living. Now I've got myself worrying 😞

[snskreationz]

I would love this 🙂

[MikeeB]

For those of you who wish to hook up a USB DAQ device to the Raspberry Pi we have been hard at work. http://https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-25806

[vitoi]

Trying to understand what the USB DAQ Driver for use with Raspberry Pi is. Tried to put a comment up at https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-25806 [note, previously supplied URL is incorrect], but couldn't.

I know one thing for sure, this is not LabVIEW for Raspberry Pi. Still waiting for that one.

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I’m always on the search for expanding LabVIEW’s reach/usefulness and this product caught my eye (even though LabVIEW doesn’t necessarily feature). I’m trying to get my head around what it is and therefore have it up my sleeve for potential future applications.

From what I can gather, a typical arrangement is something like:

 

I must be missing something. It appears that you can remove any one of the three blocks and the job is still done.

You could get rid of the NI USB-6008 since the Raspberry Pi has analog inputs.

You could get rid of the Raspberry Pi since the iPad has a processing unit.

You could get rid of the iPad since the Raspberry Pi can drive its own display (in which case you would need to add a display).

If my understanding is correct, to me, this would be far more useful if the application software ran on the iPad. That is, get rid of the Raspberry Pi. An NI USB-6008 connected to an iPad would be something useful. I don’t know why the Raspberry Pi is there (except it’s really cool to be associated with the Raspberry Pi at the moment).

A few questions to help my understanding:

1) Was the Raspberry Pi programmed in LabVIEW or some language like C?

2) Could the Raspberry Pi be removed and the same sort of software placed on the iPad?

[MikeeB]

The Raspberry Pi has no analogue inputs at all. The driver has been written to allow users to acquire values from one of the channels on the 6008/6009. The commands to acquire data are listed. One of the options is to output the data via a WebService which can be picked up on Data Dashboard for LabVIEW, this does not have to be the output however. The iPad is used as an output display as otherwise a routine using X or QT would have had to be written for the Raspberry Pi. 

The only one of the blocks that can be removed is the iPad, that is only there for a graphical display.

All of this was written in C with the web service being written in Perl.

[vitoi]

Thanks MikeB. I didn't realise that the Raspberry Pi does not have analog inputs. That really reduces my opinion of the Pi. LabVIEW programmers would certainly want analog inputs (and outputs), so maybe the Pi is not the best target for LabVIEW, should NI ever wish to implement LabVIEW targeting a microcontroller board.

I now see that the one essential part is the NI USB-6008/9. I would still get rid of the Raspberry Pi. It adds no value. With NI developing Data Dashboard there are already iPad software developers in NI. Something that customers may want is the ability to connect an NI USB-6008 directly to an iPad. Why lug around three boxes when two will do?