Best Handheld for use with Labview PDA Module utilizing Bluetooth Communication

[Greycat]

Hi:

    I'm currently specing a handheld for our current development of our custom instrumentation.  Does anyone have an opinion on which is the best/easiest Handheld to develop for and utilize the onboard Bluetooth using Labview 8.0?  The Handheld will have to communicate with our custom instrumentation via bluetooth, do some medium duty mathematics, will be exposed to some fairly harsh environments (cold and heat mostly - environmental, nothing more then that), and will have to communicate with a PC for data transfer.  Ones I have looked at are the Dell Axim X51, Palm T/X, and one of the IPAQ series (not sure which one yet).  Cost of the Handheld is only a small part of the system so that should not really be a consideration.  I thought that the knowledgable people on this forum might be able to give me some insight into which ones are best suited to my tasks so any opinions are welcome.  Thanks in advance.

Greycat

[tst]

Depending on the conditions, since you say the cost is not really an issue, you should consider getting an industrial PDA. Wireless communication consumes considerable battery power and these devices have much stronger batteries. I don't think I know of any which have BT, though.
Can you get your instruments to communicate through wi-fi? The bandwidth is much higher and you won't run into the coupling issues BT has.

"Medium duty mathematics" is a very relative term. You might want to post an example VI which people will be able to benchmark on their devices.

[Greycat]

Bluetooth communication will only be used for transfering of data.  The instrument is self contained and will download to the handheld (very little data).  Industrial PDA is out of the question (powers that be decided so), and so is Wi-Fi.  Medium duty mathematics = some light matrix math (3D rotation/transposition).  Thanks for the response.  You can find an example of the math here although this was not design to run on a PDA and I'm not incredibly familiar with the PDA development.

Greycat

[tst]

The math seems to be fairly simple, although I don't remember whether the PDA module supports the formula node and it definitely won't support the ActiveX 3D graph (nor most other stuff which includes references). Also, at least the former versions of the module were somewhat buggy and I wouldn't be shocked if this code also triggered one of those bugs. The new 8.0 is probably better. At any rate, I can't bench this at the moment, but I would suggest that you come up with a pure math VI (no graphics) with timing and post it so you will get uniform results from all those who would be willing to test it. 

In general, I don't think PDAs will be that slow when it comes to calculations like this one. This should probably take considerably less than a second (I wouldn't be surprised if it was less than a ms, as it's only a few lines of code).

[Greycat]

Hmmm ... this is interesting information.  I take it that the PDA module supports X,Y Graphs?  Doesn't support formula node?  I could do it in straight math.  I will attempt to rewrite this very soon, although my plate is very full right now, so I cannot promiss anything.  Even if this kind of math took 5 seconds, that would be fast enough for this application.  Are there any major differences between the PDA module for Palm or Pocket PC in terms of support (ie. formula node, graphs ect)?

Greycat

[tst]

As I said, I don't remember if it supports formula nodes, but it probably does. Even if it doesn't, that looks easy enough to rebuild using regular math nodes.

Each version supports more stuff (the first didn't even have tab controls) and you can find what each version is missing in the documentation which is available on the site.

I haven't had any experience with the palm version, but I think almost all functionality should be the same. There are some memory management issues (I believe CE is supposed to be better) and I don't know if palm allows calling DLL functions.

XY graphs are supported (I think they were even in the first version), but you won't be able to play with all of their properties, because there is no support for the property node before 8.0 and limited support there.

You should also probably go for the newest version because the older versions have some very annoying problems with display and bugs.

In general, developing an application for the module is the same as for the computer, except some stuff isn't supported and that what you see on the computer is not necessarily what you will see on the PDA.

[Greycat]

Formula nodes ARE supported.

Greycat