3 ms·

This might sound nuts, but if you're using LabVIEW to control National Instruments hardware, and you don't write bad code, you've got a surprisingly fast and po

This might sound nuts, but if you're using LabVIEW to control National Instruments hardware, and you don't write bad code, you've got a surprisingly fast and powerful system available at your hands. You can measure, drive, control, whatever verb for whatever piece of equipment you're using, with surprising speed, accuracy, and reliability. It's a pretty expensive stack for doing some pretty particular weird stuff but I kind of love using it. I would at least say that the prices for the hardware aren't too much higher than the competition, and the software side is way way better than the competition. I have never met a person not employed by NI who liked NI software AND equipment as much as I do. Honestly, I don't think I've ever talked to someone who used it the way I do, though... Swear I wasn't paid to write this. Figured people might have written this stuff off a long time ago and I wanted to toss some respect its way.

gamache 10y ago
LabVIEW was my first programming gig, back in high school. For the unfamiliar, it's a data-flow programming environment designed to drive data acquisition hardware. The programming interface is almost entirely graphical, in which you draw something between schematics and a block diagram; the usage interface looks not unlike laboratory equipment. I always loved how it made such difficult things so easy, while other languages' "simple" matters like loops required mental gymnastics. It's a great tool for its job.
kohanz 10y ago
My personal experience: yes to the NI hardware, but no to LabView. I used LabView during my graduate work and as someone who came from a traditional programming background, I struggled with it. More recently (almost a decade later) I had the opportunity to migrate a LabView project to Measurement Studio (NI's .NET libraries for interfacing with their H/W) and it was night and day. The NI stack works as it should and it is so much more manageable with C#.
striking 10y ago
Goodness gracious, I love LabVIEW. It's so gratifying to be able to watch the data flow from VI to VI, checking what arguments are passed. I used it for FIRST Robotics, and writing code with LabVIEW was a dream compared to its hobbled Java-1.3-like counterpart. Interfaces are great, in terms of putting together "75% tools" (ones that aren't perfect or polished, but get the job done). Being able to pull all sorts of data from an active robot and relay it to the users in an easy-to-design interface was awesome. I still wish there were a good open-source version of some parts of LabVIEW. (I also was not paid to write this. I just loved the dev environment. I never looked at data quite the same way again.)

gamache 10y ago

LabVIEW was my first programming gig, back in high school. For the unfamiliar, it's a data-flow programming environment designed to drive data acquisition hardware. The programming interface is almost entirely graphical, in which you draw something between schematics and a block diagram; the usage interface looks not unlike laboratory equipment. I always loved how it made such difficult things so easy, while other languages' "simple" matters like loops required mental gymnastics. It's a great tool for its job.

kohanz 10y ago

My personal experience: yes to the NI hardware, but no to LabView. I used LabView during my graduate work and as someone who came from a traditional programming background, I struggled with it. More recently (almost a decade later) I had the opportunity to migrate a LabView project to Measurement Studio (NI's .NET libraries for interfacing with their H/W) and it was night and day. The NI stack works as it should and it is so much more manageable with C#.

striking 10y ago

Goodness gracious, I love LabVIEW. It's so gratifying to be able to watch the data flow from VI to VI, checking what arguments are passed. I used it for FIRST Robotics, and writing code with LabVIEW was a dream compared to its hobbled Java-1.3-like counterpart. Interfaces are great, in terms of putting together "75% tools" (ones that aren't perfect or polished, but get the job done). Being able to pull all sorts of data from an active robot and relay it to the users in an easy-to-design interface was awesome. I still wish there were a good open-source version of some parts of LabVIEW. (I also was not paid to write this. I just loved the dev environment. I never looked at data quite the same way again.)