Scilab/Scicos and Linux RTAI - a unified approach

This paper presents a rapid controller prototyping environment completely based on open source software. GNU/Linux with the RTAI extension is used as a hard real-time operating system. The Scilab/Scicos suite permits performance of all phases of the control system design. A modified Scicos code generator directly generates the C-code for the Linux RTAI environment. Finally, the generated hard real-time task runs as a user space application on a standard PC using the COMEDI drivers to interface with the real plant. A GUI application facilitates the user to interact with the running real-time task (data visualization, data collection, parameters tuning) directly from any PC in the network. All needed software is available on the Web and can be freely downloaded. Some applications are presented to demonstrate the potentialities of the presented suite