4 ms·

I suppose it's fair to describe both as niche, even though basically every facility that requires high reliability controls (talking chemicals, energy, medical,

I suppose it's fair to describe both as niche, even though basically every facility that requires high reliability controls (talking chemicals, energy, medical, etc) uses Emerson. They're enormous, but they do focus on one kind of thing. It happens to also be what NI does (did) except NI did it in a way that was more accessible to education and hobbyists. Still expensive, but with things like educational toolkits using LabView as a base they have products that address the market for lower cost, lower reliability, but more flexible prototyping tools that I've never seen Emerson focus on at all. But yeah, I knew about this a year ago because it's the kind of thing that matters a lot for my work. And since then I've known to not build any new prototypes that use NI software and instead move towards anything else...

LeifCarrotson 2y ago
> And since then I've known to not build any new software that uses NI software[sic] and instead move towards anything else... Do you mean "not to build any new software that uses NI hardware", or are you specifically averse to Emerson's software dev practices even though you trust them to produce good hardware? On that note, who is your new preferred vendor for DAQ hardware? Some of the stuff that NI allowed you to build with cRIO or PC-based multifunction DAQ hardware like their PCIe-6321 etc. was pretty unique. There's not a lot of off-the-shelf gear for on the order of $1000 that can do 100 kHz digital/analog signal acquisition. I like Delta Tau PMAC gear for electronic servo control (though their recent acquisition by Omron seems to be having a similar impact as I expect Emerson is having at NI) and Delta Motion for hydraulics (not yet bought out by anyone, they seem to successfully transition to employee-owned after Natchwey retired last year, but time will tell)... but neither is a true multifunction DAQ system like NI.
- applied_heat 2y ago
  Nothing like asking a question on a forum and Natchwey answering with 3 pages of mathcad solving 7th order motion equations
- TheJoeMan 2y ago
  At my company we’ve had success with Advantech (Japanese) DAQs. I always considered NI best for research labs / benchtop measurements, and this acquisition seems like a poor fit because NI was pricy but with good end user support, while Emerson likes to have very expensive/little support.
- neltnerb 2y ago
  Well, I'd say that NI hardware was at one point the best you could get in terms of performance and ease of use, if you had tons of money. Quick prototypability is the main advantage compared to everything else. I'm not sure who I would use for that purpose, I'd say that we're blessed with a huge variety of things which are of quite good enough performance and ease of use, but also with the curse of needing to deal with different vendors for different kinds of uses. I wouldn't expect most companies that sell general purpose DAQs to also sell FPGA systems for signal processing, for instance. That's odd. But if you just mean digital and analog inputs and outputs there are so many options now that are adequate, even just an eval board for a microcontroller running a LabView firmware module can do well enough (and this route lets you escape NI better later anyway). This is a kind of cool new thing, using an Arduino or whatever as if it were an NI DAQ. So the ecosystem is much larger, and less locked into NI software (LabView anyway). On the other end where reliability is important, I wouldn't trust many places, but I barely trust NI. Honestly I'd be looking at Emerson if I wanted that level of assurance, but I wouldn't use that for prototyping. In a prototype I have to design it to fail safely enough rather than trying to make it foolproof. So for prototyping there's a ton of options now, and once the prototyping is done -- if it needs to be high reliability then it's probably going Emerson or something similarly expensive anyway, and if it needs to be low cost then you'll just put it on an embedded DAC and ADC with a ARM-M0 or RISC-V or Raspberry Pi or whatever you fancy. And if you want it to be more expensive but more reliable you buy some kind of OEM module you put on your PCB so that they can be more carefully integrated while using certified analog input and output modules. I think that ends up being three widely varying use cases, and prototyping is maybe just too easy to do in other non-LabView and non-NI-hardware systems such that the high-reliability Emerson-style market is what remains. I won't miss LabView, that's for sure.

LeifCarrotson 2y ago

> And since then I've known to not build any new software that uses NI software[sic] and instead move towards anything else... Do you mean "not to build any new software that uses NI hardware", or are you specifically averse to Emerson's software dev practices even though you trust them to produce good hardware? On that note, who is your new preferred vendor for DAQ hardware? Some of the stuff that NI allowed you to build with cRIO or PC-based multifunction DAQ hardware like their PCIe-6321 etc. was pretty unique. There's not a lot of off-the-shelf gear for on the order of $1000 that can do 100 kHz digital/analog signal acquisition. I like Delta Tau PMAC gear for electronic servo control (though their recent acquisition by Omron seems to be having a similar impact as I expect Emerson is having at NI) and Delta Motion for hydraulics (not yet bought out by anyone, they seem to successfully transition to employee-owned after Natchwey retired last year, but time will tell)... but neither is a true multifunction DAQ system like NI.

applied_heat 2y ago
Nothing like asking a question on a forum and Natchwey answering with 3 pages of mathcad solving 7th order motion equations
TheJoeMan 2y ago
At my company we’ve had success with Advantech (Japanese) DAQs. I always considered NI best for research labs / benchtop measurements, and this acquisition seems like a poor fit because NI was pricy but with good end user support, while Emerson likes to have very expensive/little support.
neltnerb 2y ago
Well, I'd say that NI hardware was at one point the best you could get in terms of performance and ease of use, if you had tons of money. Quick prototypability is the main advantage compared to everything else. I'm not sure who I would use for that purpose, I'd say that we're blessed with a huge variety of things which are of quite good enough performance and ease of use, but also with the curse of needing to deal with different vendors for different kinds of uses. I wouldn't expect most companies that sell general purpose DAQs to also sell FPGA systems for signal processing, for instance. That's odd. But if you just mean digital and analog inputs and outputs there are so many options now that are adequate, even just an eval board for a microcontroller running a LabView firmware module can do well enough (and this route lets you escape NI better later anyway). This is a kind of cool new thing, using an Arduino or whatever as if it were an NI DAQ. So the ecosystem is much larger, and less locked into NI software (LabView anyway). On the other end where reliability is important, I wouldn't trust many places, but I barely trust NI. Honestly I'd be looking at Emerson if I wanted that level of assurance, but I wouldn't use that for prototyping. In a prototype I have to design it to fail safely enough rather than trying to make it foolproof. So for prototyping there's a ton of options now, and once the prototyping is done -- if it needs to be high reliability then it's probably going Emerson or something similarly expensive anyway, and if it needs to be low cost then you'll just put it on an embedded DAC and ADC with a ARM-M0 or RISC-V or Raspberry Pi or whatever you fancy. And if you want it to be more expensive but more reliable you buy some kind of OEM module you put on your PCB so that they can be more carefully integrated while using certified analog input and output modules. I think that ends up being three widely varying use cases, and prototyping is maybe just too easy to do in other non-LabView and non-NI-hardware systems such that the high-reliability Emerson-style market is what remains. I won't miss LabView, that's for sure.