Quote:
Originally Posted by Nylex
This may be a silly question, but how are you planning to plot graphs? Do you have some library you can use or something? Would it not be easier to use some kind of software for data analysis (e.g. R, IDL, MATLAB, etc)? I'm just curious .
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I do not know what OP is doing, but there are many cases where this is not desirable or feasible.
Right now I am working on a project where real-time data comes into a digital signal processor, which does some preliminary processing (FFT, gating, windowing, filtering, etc) and then shoves it on to the Linux host across a PCI bus via DMA.
The Linux host post-processes the data, ships it off to disk, plots a lot of it, and fires some of it off across a TCP network to a Windows computer. The Linux host also ships the results of the data plots off to the Windows computer. Gnuplot is a great way to turn the DSP data into a JPG (or other format) plot, which then can be shipped directly to the windows machine.
We did some of the early prototyping in Matlab to develop some of the algorithms, but the fact is that Matlab just isn't fast enough and has much too heavy a footprint to be useful in production with this system.
We are going with heavily optimized and very fast processing because the data comes in fast and everyone has to be able to keep up. There is a lot of parallelism, and a lot of synchronization among multiple processors; it all has to happen FAST. Matlab is great for prototyping, but when you get down and dirty and real-time, you don't want Matlab or any of its cousins.