Opinions wanted: LabView-based controller?

[Danny Diaz]

Originally Posted by Mark Pierce

My FIRST Labview experiences have not made a good impression.

Sorry to hear this.

Installation instructions have been poor or missing, even with correct instructions it takes a long time to install. We usually have four classroom computers plus at least two mentor or loaner laptops.

Yup. There's a lot of code and we support more hardware than anything else you've ever installed on your computer. It's the nature of the beast.

Sample applications have been buggy and cumbersome. (Think version 1 of CMUCam application)

Please refer to my previous post.

The environment likes to start up device drivers for devices when you start the system. I still get occassional error messages from some LV process while shutting down my laptop.

Because Windows is, well, Windows, there are a lot of services we have to install in order to be able to support the plug-and-play nature of some of our devices.

LabView also likes to go out to the network when you start it. When I'm programming for FIRST, I hardly ever have a network connection. I think I eventually figured out how to turn this off.

Never heard of this. There is no reason LabVIEW needs to go to the network, it does not call home unless you ask it to during the initial licensing phase. It does create sockets and interact with the networking stack in your computer for its own internal processing (so your Windows Firewall may bark), but there's no reason for it to go to the internet or scan a network.

LabView (or at least the applications I've tried) seem to require a lot nicer laptop than the hand-me-down school laptops we've used.

For running LabVIEW applications on the laptop, yeah, you're right. But you would never use straight-up LabVIEW on an embedded target, you'd use one of our flavors of LabVIEW Real-Time.

I'm sure we can work with it, but as I've said elsewhere, the sooner we know what we're working with the better. This would be a major change, not just a rehashing the current code. Labview based development will call for an entire new set of training resources. The demo at Kettering made it look more promising than I would have thought, but the details are key to making it work.

I think everyone is on edge waiting to see what's coming down the line.

-Danny