Quotes

Life-Saving Spider Robot with LabVIEW/Blackfin

“The project of building a powerful and superior robot has been successful and development time greatly reduced thanks to graphical programming model using LabVIEW Embedded and high Processor performance of the Blackfin Processor. Schmid Engineerings ingenious graphical Fast Debug Mode turned out to be another booster during algorithm engineering, shorting development time by a factor of 5. Therefore ZMobile can be regarded as a „killer product“ for user-friendly embedded system engineering. Not only for robot designers but to anyone who is building mechatronic systems.”, says Pom Yuan Lam, (BEng) and lecturer of Nanyang Polytechnic, Singapore.

Spacecraft Attitude Control

“The ZMobile mixed signal board based on the LabVIEW Embedded Module and the Blackfin is a promising flight computing platform for high-end nano-satellite applications, since it combines an ultra low power scheme with enormous numeric processing capabilities. Thanks to high-level graphical programming, DSP power becomes now accessible to Aerospace Engineers, who may not necessarily be embedded system experts.” states Paul Moonjelly, the Project Manager and Systems Engineer for the Purdue CubeSat Program.

Subsea Pipeline Monitoring

Bjørge as, a firm specializing in intelligent underwater instrumentation and condition monitoring developed a long-term monitoring system, based on NAXYS technology. Due to the high demands on our systems, Naxys is frequently developing electronics and software for our products. However, the short schedule on this project, required us to find a well proven HW platform, and a corresponding programming tool, yielding the shortest possible implementation time. Focus was also put on efficient debugging and system testing.

The requirements for the HW and SW system to be used on this application, were not met by many, as the challenges of Naxys, was to find a platform and SW system that:
-Is small in size and can be operated in harsh environments
-Has a low, controllable and deterministic power consumption
-Can be programmed in both c and LabVIEW
-Handles parallel program loops
-Has µs deterministic program execution time
-Has computational power to perform Fourier analysis on hundreds of kb of d ata
-Has multiple analogue channels with simultaneous sampling
-Has multiple serial I/O channels
-Has digital I/O
-Can be connected to a test board for 100% accurate system simulation -
-Is as far as possible based on known solutions, in order to reduce project risk

 After thorough market research, we ended up with the Analog Devices Blackfin Processor. An excellent relation with NI Norway and NI USA, granted the best support in programming this complex task. –It is no secret that this application has pushed LabVIEW Embedded to its very limit, but both LabVIEW and VDK has passed. This is much thanks’ to the highly skilful engineers of Schmid Engineering. They have created drivers and libraries to be used directly in our LabVIEW environment, saving us valuable time, and also provided the required system stability.
This project is so far a success, and Bjørge expects to use the highly versatile system of ZMobile and LabVIEW Embedded in a wide range of our sub sea acoustics and condition monitoring applications.

 Statement of Harald Månum, Senior Engineer at Bjørge