I hated every second of it too when I was trying to learn it for robotics…I just went with c++.

wow, never thought i’d see a labview post on hackaday…

just wanted to put in my 2 cents as a certified labview dev – it is NOT a hobbyist tool. Hell, its not even an amateur tool. labview is something that firms use for quick and rapid deployment of test programs or data acq. environments, without having to know much about programming or hardware. There are clients that dont know why they need labview, they just know that Engineering Firm XYZ uses it and is successful.

I’m not saying i like it or enjoy using it, but cert’ed labview dev’s are in HIGH demand, and do pretty well from a salary standpoint.

And yes, the modules and software are TERRIBLY expensive, but remember it is targeted at the professional sector. Hell, they have a USB to 4-port RS232 switch that is $500!

Anyway, cool project!

I used labview at work for years. It was a must have for the advanced product development team that I worked with, and though it might have a steep learning curve, you can do damn near anything that you can imagine with it.

+1 for posting a labview-related article!

“Personally from the one time we were forced to use labVIEW, we hated every second of it.”
SECONDED. I could not imagine a task that Labview would be better suited for than a simple script written in a general purpose language, provided there was a simple interface to the hardware.

I agree with afex. I also use LabVIEW professionally and it has incredible capabilities – that being said if you are attempting to build something very simple one could quickly become overwhelmed or frustrated.

Now having the ability to code and build a spectrum analyzer in about 3 minutes, or an OFDM modulator in an hour… good luck doing that in C.

Seamless integration of a VSA, VSG, Virtex5 FPGA array and RAID array with full support from a single IDE? Incredible.

Of course this is running on a piece of hardware that costs $120k…. but that’s why its well suited for professional use.

@ byr_d

…Well then you must not have been using it for much! Sounds like you are more of a small time hobbyist as opposed to an engineer. If you worked as an electrical engineer, in any EE-related field, you’d know how wrong you are!!

I love labview, although it does take a long time to learn. I like it better that C++.

Did anyone use SciLab ? http://www.scilab.org/
Looks like a open source replacement of LabView.

maybe i’m remembering wrong, but labview software is pretty freaking expensive too. I took a class in labview. I’ll admit it’s impressive in what it can do (and the easy GUIs are nice), but i didn’t enjoy it at all. probly would’ve helped if our computers had something better than pentium 4s tho.

anyway, i find it ironic in this context that people usually complain about using an arduino to do a simple job, because using something like labview to interface with an arduino is the very essence of overkill.

honestly, unless i were designing a very intricate instrument interface, i’d prefer any uC writing voltages to a text file over labview. maybe i’m just lazy, but i’d say just recording data isn’t enough to justify using labview. recording and interpreting data live while controlling the instrument…that’s a job for labview. or just planning ahead.

“Drawing wires?” Yeah, that sure is terrible having to define dataflow with wired connections in some sort of graphical environment. That’s why I do all of my schematics work in C++.

If cost is a main complaint, you might gain some perspective by comparing the price of a walmart multimeter to a Fluke DMM with NIST traceable calibration certificate.

I think people are getting a bit confused about what Labview is well suited to. It is well suited to making nice user interfaces to lab equipment. It can be very handy for technicians and engineers working on tying together several instruments while performing tests. It is not well suited to highly complex programs. It is not a good choice when you need very high reliability.
It was originally intended for lab workers who were not programmers by trade, however there is now a large number of professional Labview programmers who are quick to defend the language.

@r_d
My only experience with VHDL is writing code for FPGAs or CPLDs, and it seems to me that writing code for FPGAs requires a little different mindset than writing “typical” user-interfaces, data acquisition and processing, machine control, and data-logging in a PC environment. That being said, there is LabView FPGA which I think is tailored to programming the FPGA in the cRIO backplane. I have found it quite straight-forward and powerful.

As a counterpoint, there are times when I prefer to write code instead of wiring it. Writing equations with many variables can get cumbersome for example. So, for those situations I use a mathscript or formula node and write it all out with m-code format. I can easily access .NET libraries, use activeX, run arbitrary commands in the commandline, or whatever. Oh, one other downside is that it is really easy to write HORRID obfuscated code. You can make sections of your code literally transparent. That, I would say, is a downside.

We’re hackers. If you’re whining about being held back by a mature programming environment, then I think you’re doing something wrong. For personal use I would not recommend LabView (along with NI equipment) due exclusively to the cost. But, I’d say that over the past 20 years or so, LV has proven itself useful (at least to those whose opinions actually matter) in data acquisition, machine control, data processing and logging, data presentation, user interfaces, etc.

I am a Certified Labview Developer like several of the other posters, so I do get paid to learn the stuff. As such, you may consider me biased.

Maybe all this Labview issue is just like the Lotus Notes issue. Lotus Notes sucked badly, was obsolete, migration was a problem, everybody new that, but there where plenty of jobs as Lotus Notes “certified developers” in the stupid corporate IT world who insisted on using Lotus Notes bacause it was IBM’s…and if you buy IBM you can´t be wrong….or get fired because of.

I’m still in high school(Romania) and I got to play with LabVIEW after we got the Vernier interface. My physics teacher asked me to wrap my head around it back in 10th grade. I didn’t do anything complicated with it, just standard data collection and some output tweaks.
For educational purpose I think it’s really useful and easy to use. I didn’t encounter any difficulties while trying to set up sensors and such.

LabView is a horrid language as far as the design is concerned. Documentation is poor, graphical layout is poor, no zoom, between completely different functions might be very small distances on the screen, easy things like 1+1 take far to long to do (create to constants and a “plus” triangle, connect them with wire), it is hard to modify existing programs due to complexity, debugging is also not a strength of LV. It is really just a tool that makes sense in process automation and control, and, where you pay NI to do you programming for you (what using commercial VIs and hardware is, basically). But from that I would be hesitant to say Labview is generally good not generally bad. What is bad however, is the stupid, useless task the total overkill solution here is used for.

“Personally from the one time we were forced to use labVIEW, we hated every second of it.”

I guess you either love it or hate it. I’m in the “hate it” camp:

- can’t document it (it’s graphical)
- can’t archive it (setup/initial conditions don’t get saved)
- doesn’t work the way you expect it to (user interface is not “Windows standard”)
- seems to be interpreted, and therefore reacts slowly…*too* slowly.
- oh yeah, the price, and the node locking license

We have tried to use it here at work, and it’s just too frustrating to use. You *can* get it to work, but it could really use a top-to-bottom redesign. The problem is, it’s a software development environment, but it doesn’t obey any of the rules. I should be able to ZIP up a Labview environment and send it to someone, who could then install it on his platform and reproduce my experimental setup (with all initial conditions, sampling rates, input scaling and such)…but I can’t do that, and that’s why I hate Labview.

anyone got a torrent of it because it’s not worth that price tag.

@fartface:
Look at the usual sites: piratebay et al.
Or use filestube.com to look if someone uploaded it to rapidshare/megaupload and the like

For several years during college I worked in a lab testing Gigabit Ethernet devices. We had some very complicated LabVIEW programs. Although as an aspiring software developer at the time I didn’t like the tool much, the tools we made with it were very impressive. Some of the people who made them got some had ridiculously high salaries right out of school thanks to the work too.

My old desk, a lot of the stuff they do here would be great stories on HAD. The FPGA connected directly to a SmartBits / Logic Analyzer is just one of many great hacks that are used every day:
http://www.iol.unh.edu/services/testing/ethernet/tools/gmii/

I love the comparison between LabView and Lotus Notes. For me it’s, particularly, relevant as we, unfortunately, use Lotus Notes here at my job (on top of using LabView). However, I would have to say that the comparison itself is 100% wrong. The difference is that, as has been seen here, people that develop in LabView on a regular basis, by-and-large, like it. On the other hand, even people that work in Lotus Notes on a regular basis usually admit that it sucks. From my perspective, price is the only really legitimate complaint. The other complaints (lack of documentation, lack of help, no ability to comment, no ability to save settings, etc.) are all examples of people that don’t know how to, properly, use the tool.

The simple fact is that it’s a graphically based data flow language. It’s a radically different paradigm than most programming languages. Personally, most of my computer science education and experience has been in conventional languages like C and C++. I love those languages. However, after using LabView for a while, I’ve come to respect it as being a powerful tool as long as you’re willing to put in some time to get used to the differences.

Ha! Well this sure turned out to be a hot topic. ;) Guess I’ll chime in my 2 cents. I’ve used LabVIEW extensively. I’ve found its utility to be entirely related to the intended application. I think the power in it lies in it’s prebuilt modules. For instance, if you are building an instument test platform like a bed of nails and need to do signal analysis using a Fourier transform module it is a pretty good choice. If you are going to do sequential process automation for say a chemical vapor vacuum deposition oven, it is a royal nightmare. I think many people like it for it’s ease of use in creating GUIs. Funny how no one noted it’s worst attributes of all, those being difficulty in debugging and the inability to resume a defined program startup state after a crash. If you like watching signals “flow” over wires while debugging this is just the ticket for you.

Labview is a great tool for its readability. Double click on the block diagram and leave notes wherever you want or embed them in the description field of the components. For quick prototyping and powerful features, your only setback is price. Most lab equipment manufacturers supply vi’s for their equipment, so it is a matter of dropping in the components. The design paradigm is very different from conventional programming and each program requires the labview runtime environment, but for those of us that don’t habitate in front of a computer for our office work, it works wonders quickly. Reliability is as good as the coding and you can make the code extremely complex if required. If you don’t like it, don’t use it.

How about this for a hack using LabView.

http://decibel.ni.com/content/groups/diy-labview-crew/blog/2009/10/20/a-commodore-64-emulator-written-in-labview

C64 emulated using labview code.

Personally, I love LabVIEW. (Full disclosure: I’m also an NI employee.) One of the coolest aspects of my job is seeing all the amazing things that people are doing with LabVIEW – stuff we never would have thought of. (like this example!) I’m happy to see all the discussion here too. Of course, I can’t resist the opportunity to share some of my own “insider” thoughts…

LabVIEW was originally concepted to graphically represent the way many scientists and engineers (and even some programmers) think: with flowcharts. The vision is to empower the domain expert with a tool to get the job done – without requiring a CS background. Does this mean the data flow programming paradigm makes sense for every application? No…nor is it intended to. But can it help solve the engineering challenges that we (the scientific community) face every day? Absolutely. Our goal is for engineers to spend more time finding solutions to problems and less time worrying about how to build them.

Yes, LabVIEW costs money. That’s unlikely to change in the near future, but I believe our customers see the value proposition. I think pRoFIT (above) said it best with: “So how much does it cost to pay an EE for 2 years work and how much did it cost for a sbRIO and a month for me to work on the same thing….” We’ve seen some pretty powerful demonstrations of LabVIEW in other scientific endeavors as well.

We know LabVIEW isn’t perfect. Our R&D team wouldn’t have much to work on if it were. That’s why we want to hear this feedback. Posts like this get circulated all over the company – trust me, there’s a LabVIEW R&D engineer reading this right now… Honestly, send us your ideas. In the meantime, I’d love to see more of you LabVIEW developers post your projects on Hack a Day!

I used this software at school. My first concern is the fact that this software cost thousand of dollars, is extremely buggy, takes hours to load, lag, and eat resources like shit. This software is a shit,, programmed like a shit, act as a shit. To do the same very thing in c, we could do things that take 1% of the resources, don’t bug and we have a better control over it.

This software is made so people that aren’t capable of using a computer are able to program things. I never understood the point of programming with picture and lines (in fact I don’t understand any kind of hi-level programation)

It’s great! I love it. Very intuitive way of programing. If you understand it, you can whip out a program to do something very quickly. Much faster than typing it in line by line, no matter what language you’re using.

As for input boards, I always worked with boards at work, or the ones I got from work, so that was never an issue.

(believe it not, the company I worked for bought a full package and boards, then when I transferred out of the lab, just tossed it all out. So now it’s MINE!)

Another alternative is to write your own control software (if you can !). For one of my projects I put together a quick charting software that I called “SerialChart” it is written in C++ using the QT IDE. I decided to go with my own software because I can tweak it the way I want and nothing compares to the speed of compiled C++ ! You can see an example of it’s usage here , including screenshots:

http://starlino.com/imu_kalman_arduino.html

I now updated the software to support USB HID as well as other binary encodings besides RS232 with CSV output. I am also planning to build some simple controls like dials/sliders. This project is open source so feel free to tune in !

http://code.google.com/p/serialchart/

I was former NI Apps Engineer and worked as Developer for an Alliance member… All in all did about 5.5 years worth of LabVIEW with 3.5 years of TestStand and some MySQL. I got out of that and I’m doing ERP systems now. I found it boring working with hardware.

Some ideas about LabVIEW
1) If you plan on being a test engineer or doing rapid prototyping stuff… Than LV is good for that.
2) If you plan on doing process automation, factory automation and all that. Pick up ladder logic and PLC based hardware. Very few people will trust LabVIEW for Oil & Gas control based projects. If you’ve seen the “Insane Object Error” you’ll know what i mean… The Programmable Automation Control (PAC) argument or 80/20 rule where a PAC can be used for the 20% of the work is essentially the so called niche projects that are fairly non repeating business and garbage that the bigger vendors won’t waste their time and money on.
3) If you want to head into MIS/IT/Business Apps development… Learn anything else except LabVIEW.

Thanks to all of the contributors to this forum. I have read it to understand what the best tools are for my projects (yes, plural). I am a newbie to LV. (As of 2 days ago!). Can I ask a question of you? I like working with flowcharts, then coding in C for an embedded processor application. Some of the projects I do are for industrial control purposes, others for machine control. I see advantages to using LV in both areas.
1. Machine Control: Using LV to create flowcharts that actually work, then coding PIC processors in C from the tested flowchart.
2. Industrial System Control: Using LV to create flowcharts and control panels that work in a virtual environment. I can then confirm visually with my colleagues that my designs match their criteria. After that I would be able to write the C code and assembly code for microcontrollers which will be the actual industrial process controllers. (I am thinking of Ian’s comment above, that LV is not suitable for controlling safety critical industrial processes).
A last thought. I work in a foreign language environment, and as they say, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. I believe confusion can be avoided with good graphical tools and good demonstrations. So, if some of you folks have a view that a different package is better for my needs, please consider the visual demonstration requirements. Thanks everyone.

According to wikipaedia, similar to lv is opendx, but opendx seems to have the advantage of being able to save visual programs as scripts.