Doubt, Experience and The curse of Choices

Many aspects in life would be so much simpler if there were fewer alternatives - Clive Maxfiled. This comment applies to the T&M and EDA industry too, among other contexts.

Features: choices, choices, choices.

An excerpt from Joel's blog on Less can be more goes as follows"...Every new feature is a tradeoff, between the people who could really use such a feature and the people who are just going to get overwhelmed by all the options.
...even if you think your new feature is all good and can't hurt because "people who don't care can just ignore it," you're forgetting that the people who allegedly don't care are still forced to look at your feature and figure out if they need it."

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, talks about the curse of Choices. Blink is an interesting read.

Platforms: VXI, PXI, LXI, xPC, DSpace, LMS, ETAS... choices, choices, choices.

Tom DeSantis in Avoiding the Obsolescence Trap writes "...While PXI may be a perfectly sound architecture, if the total market size of PXI is not large enough to attract a substantial number of suppliers long term, then the prospects of it being a thriving and well-supported platform in 10 years are low.
... An emerging instrumentation standard called LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation (LXI) uses Ethernet as its communications backbone and will take a stab at being the next IEEE 488 for the instrumentation world. LXI is to Ethernet as PXI is to PCI. With backing by market leaders like Agilent Technologies, LXI could very well be the next long-term standard for test-system development..."

Given the long design cycles in the aerospace arena, it’s too risky to take any long-term development project on a platform that won’t be around in a few years.

Hmm… a few things relating to PXI that I have come across are,
- There will always be a fast PC or industrial PC, faster than the best PXI controller available at the time. This is a problem when the processor in the PXI system is a bottleneck. Of course, one can synch multiple PXI systems but the cost increases too. If you know of similar PCI (or PCIe, when PCI is mentioned, automatically assume PCIe is also being included in the argument) cards that synch clocks on multiple PCs, comment on this post. Synch using reflective memory, s/w timing... any thoughts to share?
- The following math is annoying too. Cost of an industrial PC + MXI (PCI to PXI) kit is less than a comparable PXI controller! The silver lining is that you can host LVRT on a PC, checkout Dedicated PC RT-ETS Target.
- PCI i/o cards in the market > PXI ones. However, bloody marketing suits release cards in PXI first and sometimes not in PCI which puts customer is a corner and compels them to use a PXI chassis when they need i/o available only in the PXI form factor.
- PXI does have nice timing and synch features built in and PCI cards have RTSI. Is RTSI a multi-vendor supported technology? Anyone know anything equivalent to RTSI offered by PC i/o card vendors? Comment on this post.

Doubt: Synchronization...

LXI seems promising. The following things come to my mind.
- How do you synch multiple LXI systems? IEEE 1588 Synchronization, but this may not be acceptable performance for HIL, RCP systems, maybe something similar to the PXI Timing and Synchronization. Any thoughts to share, comment on this post.
- Seems like converting a PXI into LXI system will be easy with some s/w, it's the elixir, right? Sorry h/w guys ;)
PXI with a VXI-11 interface, any ideas?

Winds of change

In my blog on Intelligent DAQ I had mentioned "I can see a lot of high-level DAQ and instrument plug-in card applications gradually being replaced by a programmable platform consisting of a uP, FPGA , ADCs... for the T&M world."

A couple of weeks back a colleague proposed an embedded solution to replace the current LV-RT platform in the 787 ETCs. Nice idea (I was trying to pull something similar several months back with fledgling knowledge and some EE support) but I was annoyed having to examine the suggestion and figure out it's feasibility, as it was affecting my schedule and was under fire from the pro and anti fronts. The suggestion didn't go though but it was close. If you have used LabView Embedded Module for ADI Blackfin processors or similar platforms in an ATE/production/functional test environment, I would like to hear from you, pbathla@slc.myemployersnameonly=Moog.com.

If only there was one. At this point let's not get into a discussion of a monopoly, oligopoly or ...poly (I am running out of polies I know of). Sometimes, I simply wish life would be less complicated. An interesting tidbit, NI acquired IOtech and Measurement computing last year. Tom DeSantis, featured in this blog, is the president and founder of IOtech at this time. And news fresh off the grill is some sort of partnership of GE Fanuc Embedded Systems and Condor Engineering has been forged. When (if) NI, Agilent and Mathworks merge or collaborate, would be the day. Check out ni.com/design to see the tools that Labview integrates with. Ah, consolidation and integration is hopefully working out in the user community's favor.

Familiarity

There's a phrase in psychology--"the power of thin slicing"--which says that as human beings we are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience (sparse information).

Clive Maxfiled also wrote "When you have a history with a vendor and are familiar with using its components, tools and design flows, then you will typically stay within that vendor's offerings unless there's an overriding reason for change" So in the spirit of making progress, I am going to stick with familiar ground, "my experience", until bliss is disturbed.

Peace.

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