Output of LabView PID Control Toolkit

[Dan-Incline]

I am evaluating LabView to tune a PID loop.  From the datasheet, it looks like all of the analysis tools are there.

I am not clear on the output.  Does it have a synthesis feature to create C code?  Or is it just a matter of plugging the tuning coefficients into an existing library. 

I ultimately want to port this to an ARM control module.

[tst]

I'm not sure I understand what it is you actually want to do, but LabVIEW is not an analysis tool. It's a programming environment which happens to be geared towards analysis, so it has a lot of analysis tools shipping with it.

LabVIEW has an add-on control toolkit, which includes some PID functions, but those are written in the language itself and I assume you can find similar libraries for other languages as well. It will not generate C code - the LabVIEW code is compiled to machine code and is then run using a run-time engine on targets which have support for the run-time.

LabVIEW does have a couple of modules which translate the code to C. One creates the C code so that it can be run on Windows Mobile devices, but it doesn't give you access to the code. The other is quite expensive and is targeted at embedded targets. I'm not sure, but I think you do get the C code resulting from that one. Being automatically generated code, though, I assume it's not very usable.

If you have a background in C, you should probably use it. I believe eVC is available freely from Microsoft and I believe it should compile to ARM processors. That said, you can also download LabVIEW and run it for 30 days in evaluation mode.

[Eli_S]

Hi,

As mentioned before, LabVIEW in itself is a programming language. If you are trying to deploy this into a device with an ARM procesor such as a PDA, you can use the LabVIEW PDA module, which enables you to run the program on a PDA. If you have more specific applications you have to use the LabVIEW Microprocessor SDK.

For more information please look at these links:

http://www.ni.com/labview/what_is_pda
http://www.ni.com/labview/microprocessor_sdk