Hello,
please excuse this little advertising, but I think it's worth pointing at:
The German company cosateQ is offering the first commercial solution which is *officially* stating to use RTnet. The product is called ProSys-RT. It is a development environment for prototyping distributed real-time systems.
Development with ProSys-RT can be done with tools like Matlab-Simulink, its real-time execution platform is running on Linux/RTAI. In order to interconnect several systems in hard real-time, RTnet is included in their distribution as an alternative for an also available costly hardware-based shared memory system.
Some more technical details about their RTnet integration: They told me that long-term tests have been successfully performed with RTnet version 0.5.5, a TDMA cycle of 600 us, and three stations - which would not be the limit of the system. To simplify the switching between the shared memory cards and Ethernet with RTnet, the shared memory programming model has been mapped on the RTnet API. More precisely, they distribute the status of every station in each cycle via raw Ethernet broadcasts to all participants.
For further information about ProSys-RT, you may visit cosateQ's homepage (www.cosateq.de).
Why do I emphasise this announcement?
It is not naturally in this industrial sector that companies frankly "admit" to use Open Source in their products. But just like commercial products, also Open Source projects need acknowledgement by their users to encourage others to give it a try as well. If no one officially touches it for concrete projects, yet hesitating users are likely kept away. And more users also means more testers, bug reporters, or contributors. Maybe this pushes some of the yet hidden applications to show up and share a bit of their experiences...
This said, I definitely do not want to neglect the numerous acedemic projects already running RTnet or just having started to work with/on RTnet! They are very important for this project like for many Open Source initiatives. But the industry tends to look a bit sceptical on such "experimental" setups, although they are already much farther.
Jan
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