Scilab/Scicos is an open source project developed at the INRIA (Insitut National de Recherce on Informatique et on Automatique) in France which can be used to successfully replace other commercial and expensive software in solving mathematical and control problems. This software integrates a code generator for Scicos which has been modified and completed to automatically generate a code for the RTAI-Lab… environment. The result is a full open source rapid prototyping system based on Linux RTAI, RTAI-Lab and Scilab/Scicos which has been successfully used to quickly implement real-time controllers and data acquisition systems.

Users can work within a unique environment during all phases of control system design (analysis, controller design, simulation, implementation). After these first steps, a Scicos scheme can be designed in order to implement the derived control algorithm. This scheme can be completed with blocks from a new specific Scicos library which provides all the modules needed to interface the Scicos model to data acquisition cards, input signals and RTAI-Lab. Some I/O blocks allow distributed control in a real-time network or in a local machine and can be used to mix Scilab/Scicos with Matlab/Simulink/RTW generated codes.

Some applications are presented to demonstrate the capabilities and the performances of the environment.

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