Perhaps even more so that with standard industrial PCs, the PXI arena is seeing considerable interest in real-time OSs. Many users feel that Windows isn't reliable enough for critical systems, and they've also decided that the real-time extensions for Linux have matured into a viable alternative. And while the selection of I/O cards with fully supported Linux drivers is already limited enough on the PCI bus, it's even more limited on PXI. Helping remedy this situation, UEI has ported its Linux drivers to its family of PXI products. This is great news even for engineers who want to work with real-time Linux, because the UEI drivers are compatible with real-time extensions from both FSMLabs and RTAI (the developers of RTLinux). In addition, we've ported our drivers to QNX, a highly regarded RTOS. We also think there's a bright future for other alternatives such as the xPC Target real-time kernel from The MathWorks. Look closely, though, when you find what some vendors label a "real-time system" for PXI. With some of them, you develop application code under Windows and download it for execution on a card with a Wintel-class processor. What isn't obvious, though, is that such systems work only with proprietary I/O cards. If this supplier doesn't offer what you need, you're simply out of luck. You're also at that company's mercy when it comes to pricing and delivery. We at UEI favor an open environment. Our PXI cards run in any PXI chassis that uses a PXI-conformant controller card. We ship our Linux drivers free of charge with our hardware; indeed these drivers are available for free downloading from our web site. We support other industry standard RTOSs. We believe that such product policies will help expand the PXI market, as opposed to proprietary closed architectures that will instead drive users away.
|
