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I need to develop the real-time application which can handle user's input (from some external control panel) as fast as possible and provide some output to LCD monitor (very fast as well).

To be more exact - I need to handle fixed-time interrupts (with period of 1ms) to recalculate internal model - with current state fetched from external control panel.

When internal model is changed i need to update a picture on LCD monitor (now I think the most proper way is to update on each interrupt). Also don't want any delays here.

What is the most suitable platform to implement it? And also which one is the most cost-effective?

I've heard about QNX, IntervalZero RTX, rtlinux but don't know the details and abilities of each one.

Thanks!

Andrey Pesoshin
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As far as the different OSs, I know QNX has very good "hard" real time and has been built & optimized from the ground up. It also now has Qt running on it (QNX 6.5) for full featured GUIness.

I have heard (2nd hand) anecdotal information that rtlinux is very close to hard realtime (guaranteed realtime), but it can sometimes be late if a driver (usually 3rd party) is not coded well. [This was from a RTOS vendor, so take it for what it is worth.]

As a design issue, I'd decouple the three separate operations into three threads with different priorities: one thread to fetch the data and set a semaphore that new data is ready, one thread to update the model and set a semaphore that the model is ready, and one thread to update the GUI. I would run the GUI thread at a much slower update rate. Most monitors are in the 60-120Hz range for updating. Why update faster than the data can be shown on the screen?

jwernerny
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