Project Advice- Two arduinos and sensors and actuators

[MustafaMX5]

Hey everyone,

I am a very new user of the LVIFA Toolkit and plan to do a project later on after learning much. I don't want to be overly tecnical so I will leave my questions in simplest form. My fpaln is to have an arduino with a couple of sensors on it and hook it up to Labview and then have another arduino with motor actuators hooked up to arduino. I want the sensors to pick up data and the GUI to display and then I want that sensor data to be used in varying something like the motors torque. I understand that labview has to be running and the program should be connected but my concern is whtehr or not this is feasible. Thanks a lot.

[Nathan_B.]

It is possible to simultaneiously communicate with two Arduinos.  I've done it for one of my projects.  I wrote several custom VIs to do this but you can simply use the existing VIs as long as you hard code the COM port numbers to which each of the Arduinos are connected.

Is there a particular reason why you want to use two Arduinos instead of just one?

[MustafaMX5]

Thanks for replying, It gives me hope in doing the project.

[MustafaMX5]

I plan to have many sensors in one arduino and many actuators in the other and I think that all the I/O pins will be all used, yet for now I'm not sure of how many specifically.

[mknix]

Hi,

The serial stream might be the bottleneck, and should be considered carefully if you have mutliple sensors and if you need data aquiring close to real time...

Good luck for your project,

regards

antoine

[Nathan_B.]

Like mknix said, an Arduino/LIFA system is not going to be very good if you are needing or wanting something close to a real-time system.  So, you have to keep this in mind when designing your system.