http://www.ni.com/embedded/

Anybody seen this?
LabView is a graphical dataflow programming language aimed as scientific and industrial automation markets. I have a buddy that works with free-electron lasers and he told me about a new product that they have. LabView Embedded allows you to design firmware for ARM chips in LabView and burn them to the chips with a programmer. The chips can then be embedded in various off-the-shelf boards and devkits, and Viola! Embedded system! ARMs are very fast and some flavors are aimed at multimedia development (think iPhone).

This is a 10k product or so. Is there an OpenSource alternative? Can Pd enter this realm?

I've been interested in this for a while. I've extensively used Pd and extended it on my own, and also have used LabVIEW for a few years in an engineering setting.

I really want to make a Pd -> VHDL compiler, from there you could definitely print chips. However, I would also want to add support for a "patch" that runs external C (or C++) code, since sometimes you will definitely need the low-level abilities of C when writing firmware.