DK,
I have experience only on the fringe of what you're trying to do. My task was
to take information from an aircraft sensor simulator and feed the data into a
matlab (simulink really) model of the aircraft dynamics, and then return the
aircraft states and such back to the simulation. This was done at 100Hz.
Servos were to be simulated in a different manner.
I took the a/c simulation from simulink, created a windows .dll and embedded
this into a LabView executive. The labview program talked mostly across
ethernet using udp/ip with the sensor simulator. Other inputs were read by
Labview using analog inputs, CAN bus and what not.
All and all, it worked quite nicely for what we were trying to do. As to
observations and biases:
An awful lot depends on your definition of realtime. In my situation, I
wouldn't even consider trying to run the model in the matlab environment.
Same goes with your robustness requirements. Using LabView on NT, I could not
guarantee that the OS wouldn't steal CPU and make me miss a frame (the
vernacular being that my platform was not a realtime, deterministic system).
Another downside of my approach was the effort required to develop the tlc
files for the realtime workshop to create the windows .dll. I had to recruit
the help of a very capable s/w dubbie, which the program could ill afford, and
which cost me many boxes of donuts ;).
On the upside, outside of creating the .dlls, I was able to build and code
this system without much outside help. I can do matlab/simulink, LabView
programming's a piece of cake and provides the benefits of compiled code.
Integration of NI cards for DAQ is relatively easy, but you may need to spend
some time sorting out your signal conditioning requirements.
Good luck and enjoy. Sounds like a fun project.
-Chris
DK wrote:
> Hi
> I am a MATLAB user, but do not have any experience using their Data
> Acquisition Toolbox. I am wondering if anyone in this newsgroup has
> experience using MATLAB (alone or in combination with LabView) for
> multichannel data acquisition and Signal
> Processing Toolbox for real-time decision making? Would appreciate greatly
> if you could share your
> experiences - (any shortcomings/advantages?)
>
> Thanks in advance
