Just to publicize a little known solution that lets one use the best development environment with NI hardware.
One can use a cheap PC as the host for all the hardware running the PharLap RT/OS as the target machine. This gets around the extreme cost of a PXI crate and embedded hardware. http://zone.ni.com/devzone/conceptd.nsf/webmain/2B20D544723C8F2D86256E8C0071C201 With LabVIEW 7.1 the "host PC" can be an Apple MacIntosh running OS X! The realtime target can be any cheap PC, though NI lists some systems as recommended it seems that the RT/OS will boot and run on most hardware. Mac OS X and LV 7.1 now support cross compiling for the RT/OS. This can be simply linked to the host thru ethernet. For a good solution one should probably throw a second cheap ethernet interface in the host to keep network problems isolated from data transfer and control. This will allow development in a clean, reliable and efficient environment with compatibility to all of NIs hardware. The only real drawback is supporting the hardware of a cheap wintel box and the time labor associated with that. However the Pharlap OS has a reputation of being fairly clean and robust to avoid the normal problems associated with more common desktop OSs. I hope to get this info added soon to the OSX - Labview info page <http://sthmac.magnet.fsu.edu/labview/LVonMacOSX.html> -Scott
