Especially companies with international orientation prefer Windows as an operating system. But while today-s PCs seem to be powerful enough for time-critical applications at a first glance, practical tests show: Without a real-time extension, Windows only delivers something like ’Real-time for fair-weather conditions’. But automation requires a deterministic behaviour in every situation. Everything else would not be tolerable in industrial applications and could have fatal influences.
The Berlin company Kithara Software provides the »RealTime Suite« for Windows. A wide range of the functional modules fulfill highest real-time requirements and can be arranged individually. In this way different solutions of communication for industrial automation can be realized with EtherCAT, real-time ethernet or CAN. The high-precision timers enable a priority-based, preemptive multi-tasking system, as professional programmers do expect from an RTOS. It supports tasks with up to 255 priority levels and executes only the highest priorized task in real time.
PC-based control solutions–in contrast to traditional PLCs–are better suitable to meet the requirements of engineers when the projects are growing complex. Developers of applications with robotics, sophisticated mathematical calculations or imaging demand environments which are highly flexible but simple to implement.
The »RealTime Suite« is available for native code of the C/C++ and Delphi programming languages. C# is also applicable if DLLs are used. It supports all Windows versions including the new Windows 7.
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