What are your thoughts on LabVIEW?

[ivan747]

Would you use LabVIEW in your typical workflow?
Or maybe you think it's cumbersome...
Maybe you like tro write your own stuff?

Recently I've been interested in this program, so I wanted to see what people actually use it for, or why are they not using it.
Personally I got a Rigol scope and I'm getting myself an arbitrary waveform gen sometime soon, it's one of those Chinese ones that don't really come with software. But anyway, I'm getting interested in automated testing and what not.

-Ivan

[timb]

Fuck LabView with a big bag of dicks.


Sent from my Tablet

[awallin]

It's quite good for quick tests and simple (e.g. datalogging) programs. Collect data from some instrument, with a driver that is usually available or downloadable, and plot it and save it to disk.

It starts to be problematic when your program grows. It's hard to keep a large program readable, and some VIs tend to expand into a large mess ("explosion in a spaghetti factory"). What the LV courses teach you, I imagine, is how to handle the complexity of a large program while working with a visual programming language.

NI sells LV with large (70% or more) discounts to universities, to get engineers and scientists hooked at an early age. Recently I've found that at research institutes that are expected to pay full price for LV licenses it's not at all clear that you can have LV on any computer you want (like at uni(.

They make a Linux version, but AFAIK they haven't ported the fpga and real-time modules to linux, which is somewhat of a deal-breaker for some of our projects.

[ivan747]

It's quite good for quick tests and simple (e.g. datalogging) programs. Collect data from some instrument, with a driver that is usually available or downloadable, and plot it and save it to disk.

It starts to be problematic when your program grows. It's hard to keep a large program readable, and some VIs tend to expand into a large mess ("explosion in a spaghetti factory"). What the LV courses teach you, I imagine, is how to handle the complexity of a large program while working with a visual programming language.

NI sells LV with large (70% or more) discounts to universities, to get engineers and scientists hooked at an early age. Recently I've found that at research institutes that are expected to pay full price for LV licenses it's not at all clear that you can have LV on any computer you want (like at uni(.

They make a Linux version, but AFAIK they haven't ported the fpga and real-time modules to linux, which is somewhat of a deal-breaker for some of our projects.

Guess what, my university doesn't give students a student email accound.  So it's gonna be harder for me to get a discount 

Fuck LabView with a big bag of dicks.


Sent from my Tablet

That's one strong opinion 

[XFDDesign]

LabView is NI's idea of VisualBasic slammed into a bloated back-end that is rife with compatibility issues (DLL versioning issues, OS issues, etc).

[AlfBaz]

Would you use LabVIEW in your typical workflow?
Or maybe you think it's cumbersome...
Maybe you like tro write your own stuff?

I'm happy to play the devils advocate here

If you are doing a lot of different measurement setups (with some degree of complexity) then it becomes worthwhile to become acquainted with labview. Once you get a feel for it, it doesn't take long to "knock up" rough and ready applications and you soon build up a number of vi's that can be reused or repurposed for other applications

Is it cumbersome? Hell yeah!
Coming from a programming background I find some of the most trivial tasks a pain in the arse. Fortunately typing "labview" and then what you want to do in google, generally gives you a quick answer.

Once you get use to it's little quirks it becomes less cumbersome. I find it especially useful if you need to graph stuff.

If I build up something that becomes repetitively useful, I'll simply compile an "executable" out of the vi's and use that instead of firing up labview.
I have yet to come to grips with being able to distribute said "executable" as it's size is rather unwieldy and it's installation on a PC without labview installs a lot of crap the end user is not happy with that needs to run in the background as services, whether you run the app or not.

Normally when this happens I'll simply code my own application that mimics the labview app. As I code in windows api the resultant exe is a single file mostly a couple of hundred kB's in size

[Neilm]

It starts to be problematic when your program grows. It's hard to keep a large program readable, and some VIs tend to expand into a large mess ("explosion in a spaghetti factory"). What the LV courses teach you, I imagine, is how to handle the complexity of a large program while working with a visual programming language.

The courses I went on didn't even mention it. The best solution I ever found was to split everything up into the smallest blocks possible. Even then, that was only partially successful.

[Lukas]

Are you already familiar with any programming language? Even Visual Basic will do the job. Grab VISA bindings for your language and the instrument's command reference and you're ready to go.

[ivan747]

Are you already familiar with any programming language? Even Visual Basic will do the job. Grab VISA bindings for your language and the instrument's command reference and you're ready to go.

Is VISA available for free?
Is it cross platform?

[synapsis]

Fuck LabView with a big bag of dicks.

^ This.

I'll add a couple of examples of why. I've been working extensively with their Vision Builder for Automated Inspection product. Even doing simple math in the Labview environment is painful. Graphical programming is horrible in general (Opto22 for instance) but the tedium of drawing each individual operation gets old quickly.

So to get away from that (and the huge limitations of their built in "Inspection Interface Editor"), I started interfacing with VBAI using C#. The libraries they provide have NO documentation. None. On their forums they specify that the libraries are simple so that the examples they provide will be sufficient. Then I stumbled upon this gem of an exception error:

Vision Builder AI:  (Hex 0xFFFA9662) An unknown error occurred

The last example is a feature that seems so obvious, it had to be included. Being able to reset a counter to zero. If you're using a task to, say, read a quadrature encoder... you can't reset it to zero. You need to stop and restart the task. (https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-6576). How hard is it to zero a memory location?

Two bags of dicks.

[free_electron]

Is VISA available for free?

yes. download from either NI or Agilent

Is it cross platform?

yes , it exists on many platforms. Almost all versions of windows (3.1 to win8 ) , DOs, HP/UX, Solaris, SunOs,

Labview is horrible and great at the same time. IT is great if your setup consists of ONLY national instruments machinery. drop in an play. drag something else in there ( real test equipment ) and it becomes a horror...

incomplete drivers, full of bugs, nonexisting drivers.  they rely on the 'community' to provide those... in other words : you are on your own bub...

[Howardlong]

Here's something I just don't get, why is it so effing massive?

I installed it for the second time in my life a few weeks ago, apparently it's a pre-req for Rigol scope software, it's frikkin enormous, and installs a dozen serivces. Shirley you don't need all this crap? Well no you don't, I stopped all the services and the Rigol app still ran.

Had a similar experience eight or nine years ago with a Tek TDS 2024 & NI. So what's it all about?

Sorry I'm a bit thick when it comes to test equipment automation.

[Maxlor]

LabVIEW is an abomination. The code is simply not maintainable with reasonable effort.

That, and it's marketed at non-programmers which means a lot of the "code" you see is horrible. Just because it's graphical instead of plain text doesn't mean general programming best practices like modularization, narrow interfaces or code reuse instead of code copying don't apply. I've seen this with device manufacturers a number of times. A company which makes a really awesome sensor but as soon as you see their software it's obvious they're all hardware guys, not much software experience, and one of them whipped up a LabVIEW GUI.

And then there's the license costs which are outrageous, and the terms are from yesteryear. I mean, wtf, I have to buy a new license to install it on a Mac instead of a Windows machine? Why would that even make a difference.

I wish the thing was never invented.

[timb]

LabVIEW may be cross platform, but the drivers sure ain't! Well, I mean VXIplug&pray, err, no, sorry, IVI Drivers. They come in three flavors, IVI-com, IVI-c and IVI.NET, with IVI-COM being the most popular by far. All three classes of instrument drivers are written to specifically tie into visa32.dll, making them non-cross platform.

So, you've got your physical hardware interface (GPIB, RS-232, LAN, USB, etc.) and their associated drivers, then VISA with its own set of drivers for the physical interfaces, then you've got IVI which needs its own specific drivers for each instrument you want to use. Now, these IVI drivers basically encapsulate SCPI commands for your specific device and make them accessible via a device tree through the Windows COM interface as generic classes.

On top of that, you need LabView specific Drivers for your instrument, as their generic VXI class drivers are pretty much shit. The LabVIEW drivers end up bypassing IVI and talking directly to VISA half the time.

Honestly, the whole purpose of SCPI was to give instruments of similar types (scopes, DMMs, etc.) similar command sets for ease of programming. VISA makes it easy to talk to instruments regardless of interface. I guess IVI makes it easy to access the SCPI command tree through Windows specific programming interfaces. So why fucking use LabVIEW? Why did they have to try and reinvent the already complicated goddamn wheel?

Fuck NI. Fuck LabVIEW.




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[Macbeth]

My brief foray into LabView still makes my piss boil when I think about it. Somehow it would remember bits of code even after I wiped the directory and uninstalled, did a registry scan for deleting anything related to labview and my code conversion, then re-installed LabView. Arrrrgghh! Quite where or why it would hide my code mods I still can't fathom to this day.

BTW, I was modifying the LeCroy WaveStation Labview code to work with my Siglent SDG1000 series. Yes I got it working, using the most bizarre visual programming environment ever, but some things would not be saved and be overwritten when reloaded.

Thankfully VISA with SCPI is a piece of piss to code into VB, Excel, or C#.NET, etc. Proper code. No mysterious ghosts hidden away anywhere. Much much easier to code to.

...and then the price!!!??? I was just using an eval version, but OMG, so much money for such a POS.

[drewtronics]

We were building some vehicle networking testbed stuff and the NI equipment had all the right buzzwords on it, and my boss/professor knows and loves labview. Even with the education discounts, it is easy to drop tons of money on the hardware. They are really proud of the cRIO expansion cards. $1k US for a CAN card. Insane.

With a background in normal programming, even the simplest things I found problematic. The FPGA modules were just horrible.  Linux on ARM and custom interface hardware were much better suited for our uses next time around. I guess that puts me in the "screw labview" camp.

[Rigby]

labview is labview.

i've seen labview quickly work magic in the hands of people that know it well, and i've never had anything but bad experiences with it.  i hate it, myself.

graphical/visual programming is AWFUL in every way.  if LabView had a textual programming interface, I'd hate it a lot less.

it is widely used in the automotive industry and, as i said, in the hands of someone qualified, it is very powerful.  very few people are someone that i would call "qualified."

[Neganur]

Here's something I just don't get, why is it so effing massive?

I installed it for the second time in my life a few weeks ago, apparently it's a pre-req for Rigol scope software, it's frikkin enormous, and installs a dozen serivces. Shirley you don't need all this crap? Well no you don't, I stopped all the services and the Rigol app still ran.

Had a similar experience eight or nine years ago with a Tek TDS 2024 & NI. So what's it all about?

Sorry I'm a bit thick when it comes to test equipment automation.

If you're talking about LabVBIEW - well, you compile your stuff and run the exe on your target system. Or if you were talking about VISA, *shrug* your OS is probably full of unnecessary stuff too.