Real Time continued

Alright. I've been away for a bit. Was sick, and then had a car show... The break has given me some fresh air to hit it hard when I came back...


I've been working on the real time module to work at getting some samples from the frequency generator I have hooked up to the sbRIO board. It looks promising, but there are soo many layers with funky timing that it seems a little convoluted. Anyways... The real time wizard spits out a project explorer that I then went and dumped in an FPGA vi to acquire some data from the AIO port on the sbRIO board. Then the data input, I linked into the shared variable engine which let me tie that data up to a variable that can be accessed on a higher level VI, which can then be manipulated with the whole control palette instead of the limited FPGA stuff. I'm still a bit floundering in the dark, so I posted my progress on the ni forums to maybe get some insight about what I am doing right/wrong. I'll post my post recent project explorer so you can see kind of how the realtime project flows.

Real Time

I think I am kind of geared in the right direction by doing a real-time measurement. When I go into the real time wizard though, and it completes the wizard, it throws some error about missing some Variable timing engine. I looked it up online, and it says you need to install it through MAX. I went into MAX, and it is already installed. Not quite sure.. I love errors that compound my confusion.

Frustrating

I'm banging my head against the wall a bit, but that's nothing new... Trying to wrap my mind around the whole idea of getting some data up to the host vi, let alone putting it into a more useable format that just an indictaor... The getting started guide wasn't much help when it talks about waveforms, as it sees a continuous stream of data, where I will be waiting for the FIFO buffer to fill up, assert interrupt request, pass data up to host vi, then concatecate the data into an array, and then spit it into some useful waveform, or distribution, or plot, or some psuedo-oscilliscope.

Anyways, that's enough of my ranting.. Until next friday.

-Kyle

What's the frequency Kenneth?

So yeah, the subject is the name of a REM song. It was big when I was a teenager. Anyways..

Dr. He and I had a little chat today. Kinda got me going in a better direction. I broke out the signal generator, and hooked it up to one of the analog inputs. That wasn't the hard part.

I even got the FGPA VI done for it. Working on the Host VI side of it though. Getting the data seems to be pretty easy, but getting it into a workable form is another story. Since it is sampled data, it is a digital signal so to speak. Here is where I'm lacking a bit of knowledge.. Do I dump the digital signal into a 1D array, then generate a waveform? Or is there a way to take the digital data, and drop it straight out to a waveform that I can see? Still working on that.. Until next friday.

-Kyle

Progresso

Soo.... John had a lot of questions today, and we worked on a couple VIs. This capturing sound idea is quite a bit to chew. Just taking in a lot of information, and it is taking me down some complex roads. We'll get there though, or at least have a pretty good understanding of why we can't get there. Pick one.

Have a great weekend.

-Kyle

push it to the limit

So today we did a lot of research and conversations about things we were working on. I will post the updated VI from before for download as an edit to this blog entry later.

fixed the blinkers

With the help of Kyle we figured out that since we were plugged into the digital I/O and the high pins we needed to change the vi somewhat to reflect this. This sort of thinking about problems helps. We must remember that we are not only writing code (or perhaps drawing it in this case), we are also interacting with an electronic circuit board. Picture of the VI is included.