Making things realtime

[marc lawrence]

We have a system (developed for us) which is supposed to be sending data every two seconds. This it does well - except occasionally it 'skips' : Looking into the vi shows that sometimes the system has 'frozen' for a second. It appears that this could be resulting from Windows 2000 doing a 'tidy up' or an IO command blocks all Labview threads.
One idea which has been proposed is to move to Realtime systems. How easy is it to port existing apps to a realtime environment; and any ideas about costs?

At the moment our configuration features a powerful single processor (P4 with Win2000) and specialist IO boards. The processing maths is done on a remote machine using DCOM to connect with Matlab. These features would need to be available on a RT sy
stem.

Thanks in advance, Marc

[markwysong]

NI's real-time software works great if you are using their hardware I/O. But keep in mind that when you switch to LabVIEW real-time, you're using their NI-DAQ software layer in PHARLAP (their real-time OS) to talk to any hardware on the PCI bus. That means that mostly, you can use NI hardware, but it's going to be difficult to find drivers for other manufacturer's hardware.

Second, I would think that DCOM would *not* be supported in PHARLAP. I would think you'd need an intermediate PC to get the data from the real-time system, and use DCOM to send it to Matlab. In this case, you might be defeating the purpose.

Mark