What is LabVIEW

[Danny Diaz]

Originally Posted by Dr.Bot

There is a version of Labview called RoboLab written for the Lego RCX brick.

True and False. RoboLab isn't actually a version of LabVIEW, it's an app built on top of the LabVIEW runtime engine. It uses all of the components of LabVIEW but isn't a specific "version" of LabVIEW. Originally Chris Rogers at Tufts wrote VI's to plug into LabVIEW, and we worked with him to expose the front-end hooks necessary to make it its own "application". However, with that said, each of the last 4 versions of RoboLab (at least, could be more) has used a version of LabVIEW that was specifically tweaked for RoboLab - we took a version of LabVIEW (LabVIEW 7.x for the latest version, RoboLab 2.5.4) and released a dot-release for RoboLab specifically.

Originally Posted by Dr.Bot

Any way you can get a good introduction to Labview for very little $$$. I don't think LabView would be suitable for FRC, heck - you guys need to learn C eventually!!!!

LabVIEW Student Edition costs $89, it's also a cost-effective way to learn LabVIEW. Realize that only the most advanced RoboLab programs will actually use LabVIEW as you would consider it as a real programming language, there are a lot of things you cannot do with LabVIEW when targeting an RCX. I would strongly disagree that LabVIEW wouldn't be suitable for FRC - as a matter of fact, it might be better than traditional C programming. It all depends on whether or not you're more trying to emphasize low-level or high-level programming; more and more colleges are not teaching C or C++ but more Java because they are focusing more on high-level programming. I agree you should learn what's inside the hardware "black box" and how to control it, but when it comes down to it what's important (especially for FIRST) is how to incorporate the usage of the hardware, sensors, and such in a program at a high level. Drowning in the implementation details of a list or an array is a GREAT academic effort but completely unnecessary for a 6-week competition.

-Danny