Re: [BLACKBOX] Questions about inheritance

From: [at]} <Rainer>
Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:31:30 +0100

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Wojtek,

> Now I am getting excited. I am attaching a photo of a hardware
> board which
> I designed and built last year. Now I am developing the FPGA
> firmware and
> the embedded Linux software running on this board. A quick look at the
> board will tell you it is a VME board. I never did anything
> substantial in
> VME. It is a new area to me.

We are now with VME-bus systems since beginning of the 90ies. There
are still
some dozens of these systemsin deployment in our production area, and
they
run 24 hours 7 days a week without problems. They have prooved to be our
most reliable systems.
Whe have experienced the VME hardware to be a long term technique
compared
to the PC world, which is important if you have to run and maintain
systems for
a period of up to 15 years.
Unfortunately there was never time enough to develop our own VME
hardware.
We had to rely on standard components. This was possible because our
requirements to data aquisition and process control are very simple
compared
to yours.


> This also rings a bell! I used LabView once to test my first piece of
> hardware, which was a CAMAC timing board. I needed to send a few
> simple
> commands to that board, and collect test data. A collegaue of mine
> sent me
> a "virtual instrument" written in LabView for a roughly similar
> instrument. I took me a week to make seemingly simple changes,
> which would
> have been trivial under any programming language. When I got it
> running,
> it could collect data some 10,000 times slower than the hardware
> limit. I
> completed my tests, but this experience left me wondering how LabView
> could have become a huge market success?

> I am myself inclined to avoid LabView like a plague. But try saying
> this
> to an electrical engineer.

This is an interesting topic which in the end could lead to a discussion
about success of programming languages
- on the market
- in the brains of people.

As far as I know LabView came up in the mid 80ies on the Apple
Macintosh.
It was intended to enable the electrical engineer to automate
measurement tasks
without having to learn "all this nasty programming stuff", i.e. a
programming
language, how to call a compiler and linker, writing makefiles and so
on.
Electrical engineers feel familiar with LabView because the code
looks similar
to circuit diagrams.
But designing a software project which requires you to have certain
concepts
of abstraction available (modules, adt's, objects ...) to simplify
matters is a totally
different task compared to the painting of circuit diagrams ...

The hardware concept (standardized motherboard which is customisable
via project specific daughter boards) you described does make a lot
of sense
to me. I'm thinking in the same direction with my "home project". I
guess I will
first try to do a design for the standard application, make some
experience, and
will perhaps later try a second design which is adaptable to specific
needs.


Anyway, thanks a lot for your help and for the description of the
projects
you are working on. Very interesting topics in my opinion ...


Best regards,
Rainer

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Received on Sat Mar 26 2011 - 15:31:30 UTC