Adaptation of LIFA (LabVIEW Interface For Arduino) to other Arduino compatible boards

Question

Hello evryone,
 I am trying to use a ''Sakura board", which is an Arduino compatible board, having similar programming as Arduino. This board is manufactured by Renesas; more specifications on it can be found on the following link: http://sakuraboard.net/gr-sakura_en.html
What I would like to know, is if the firmware used for LIFA to interface Arduino with labview, or the ChipKit firmaware, can be used to this kind of Arduino compatible boards.
My aim, is to use the Sakura Board for acquiring signals from various pins(Be it digital or analog), and setting other pins (Digital) parralelly, using labVIEW, as this is done using LIFA, or LabVIEW interface for ChiKit!!
Thanks in advance for your support.

Answer 1

I haven't had any experience with the Sakura board, so can only go on the information on the website.
I've used the Arduino LabVIEW interface previously, and it basically uses serial communications between the PC and the Arduino. This serial interface is provided by the on-board USB-serial converter (an ATMega8u2 running custom firmware).
From what I can tell about the Sakura, it appears as a storage device when plugging into a PC, and doesn't seem to have a USB to serial converter. If this is the case, then the LIFA toolkit won't work. That said, my understanding of the Sakura board may be incorrect (for example I'm unsure what operation modes the slide switch changes between). If you can confirm it has a USB-serial port then LIFA may work. I guess the key thing is that the serial port is required.
You may be able to use a software serial port (http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/SoftwareSerial) on the Sakura to communicate with a PC, though that would require a PC with a serial port, or an external USB-serial converter. This approach would also require you to modify the LIFA arduino code (located in vi.lib\LabVIEW Interface for Arduino\Firmware\LIFA_Base) to reference the software serial port. It's probably a long shot that this will work, as the software serial library has been written for AVR chips, making use of their specific internal timers.