Implementing NASA's core flight software (cFS) in national instruments LabVIE

This research set out to develop and integrate the Core Flight System (cFS) framework, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) developed open-source software, within the National Instruments (NI) LabVIEW development environment. This effort included the development of key cFS "apps" as a toolkit of "virtual instruments" (vi) within the LabVIEW development environment. NASA has developed Core Flight System (cFS), also known as Core Flight Software (cFS), as a platform independent, modular, and small footprint flight software framework that is open-source and available to the general public. National Instruments (NI) flagship systems development tool, LabVIEW, is commonly used to quickly develop and deploy embedded systems by NASA as technology development and test support. The ultimate goal of this research is to introduce a paradigm shift in the way NI hardware platforms are used at NASA, and allow them to be integrated side-by-side with flight systems. If a LabVIEW based system can communicate with a cFS based system, this will forge the bridge between a bona fide flight software framework and a flexible, reconfigurable, off-the-shelf system. To that end, the concrete goal of this project was to create an emulation of a networked cFS instance in LabVIEW.;Chapter 1 introduces the current need for this marriage between cFS and LabVIEW, specifically the possibility of a mixed-maturity environment while developing space systems, and perhaps even a preservation of the "path-to-flight" for LabVIEW driven systems. Chapter 2 provides a general literature review of the bridge concept between two frameworks like cFS and LabVIEW, and introduces the cFS app Software Bus Network (SBN) which is the basis for this research. Chapter 3 describes and defines the developed methodology followed to accomplish the objective, including the creation of "SBN_LV", or SBN implemented in LabVIEW, and the definition of a test case. Chapter 4 documents the design of SBN_LV, the results obtained from the test case, and confirms the success of a networked cFS node written in the LabVIEW language. In conclusion, Chapter 5 recommends follow on research into more cFS applications being translated into the LabVIEW language.