Java vs Labview

[David Lame]

In general, LabView is easier for non-programmers to understand. That's a big plus.

I find LabView to be very straightforward. As long as you are doing fairly simple, straightforward, things, LabView is great. When you get into more complicated stuff, I found that I had to jump through hoops to store variables and loop through conditions. Java is much easier than that.

For example: Here's a proud moment of our code:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roVc581joiA

We're the lower robot on the blue alliance. Our autonomous code lowers the arms, and then drives forward for a certain amount of time, and then the vision program kicks in and it goes toward the goal to try to make a shot.

You could do that all with a filmstrip in LabView. However, that isn't really what the code does. What we found is that we had an issue crossing the moat. Sometimes we got hung up. That was all about wheels and center of mass and all sorts of mechanical things, but we didn't have time to fix that, so we changed the program.

Lower the arms. Drive forward. When done driving forward, check the accelerometer values on the built in tilt sensor. If it appears to be on level ground, transfer to vision control. Otherwise, move backward briefly. Rest, and then gun it. Repeat up to three times.

That conditional loop is very straightforward in a high level language, but harder in labview. You end up with filmstips inside filmstrips, or custom VIs.
It is not awful. It's not incredibly hard, but your code ends up with a bunch of nested diagrams that are not easy to decipher. The java code was just a couple of lines, and worked very smoothly.

And then on top of that, we had a bunch of conditional statements for stability control, adjusting wheel speeds to prevent tipping. Reading and substituting PID values in certain cases, but not in others. Those nested if-thens are easy in Java. The LabView code gets pretty ugly.


Also, source code control is very difficult with LabView. If you have three programmers, you will be better off if you are using Git or SVN to share code, but that doesn't work as well with LabView.

So, my summary is that if you want to use your code to drive the robot and manipulate the actuators, LabView probably works. If you want to start doing fancy computation, move to Java.

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

This is not a dig against LabView but:
There is no LabView at my financial institution.

Here, I will come to LabView's defense. I have used LabView professionally. I was working on jobs that analyzed noise and vibration signatures. I could use LabView to hook up my microphones, set a digital trigger, read a sound snippet, compute the FFT, and plot the power spectral density, and set a digital output, all in a few minutes of writing code. We used it a lot for prototyping, because it was just so much easier than writing "real" code. It even made it into some production systems when those were straightforward execution paths.

Furthermore, the word "LabView" on a resume screams "engineer" instead of "IT guy". If you are looking for jobs outside of the IT department, having LabView on your resume will raise the flag that this is probably someone comfortable with a voltmeter.

Labview is absolutely useless if you want to develop enterprise-style business systems, but, as you noted, when working with automation, it can be a very useful professional skill.