I was wondering if anyone knows what version of LabVIEW will be shipping in the 2011 kits. I’m really excited about some of the new features in the 2010 edition, and I’d like to know if I’m going to have them.
I’ve tried searching all over the place but couldn’t find anything.
I’m hoping beta test teams can try and answer my question based on what they’ve received.
We do get a technically new version, but not completely new. Last year we had 8.6, now we get 8.6.1 which isn’t completely compatible. You can still use old robot code with it though. It would have been nice to get LV 2009 because it has a couple extra nice features.
We’ve got a help site for what you’re asking, check it out:
https://sites.google.com/a/team2472.com/2472controlsystemprogramming/
Thanks for the quick response.
That’s disappointing, I was really hoping for some of the new features. Ever since NI introduced LabVIEW Idea Exchange they’ve been adding lots of useful features every version, and quite often.
Certainly, I agree. I’m a big fan of Code Snippets, once we get to use it.
Yeah, being an LV developer at my fulltime job, its a shame that the teams are stuck using a 2 year old software package. LV2010 has some really nice features that make it significantly more user-friendly than 8.6.1
I understand the difficulty in being able to use the current version with being able to get the libraries and such updated in time to get everything to the beta test teams, with NI’s release schedule being tied to NI Week. However, I was really hoping we would stay only one version behind this year and move up to LV2009 
I have the option at work of using 2009 or 2010, and was really hoping to not have to maintain an older version on my laptop in order to support my programmers.
Really looking forward to the day when we can use all the cool stuff in 2010, but would have been very happy to at least get the cool stuff in 2009 this year.
But by then we’ll be stuck waiting for the cool stuff in the 20XX version…
While I would love to have LabVIEW 2010… I don’t think it’s ready for us. I’ve been working on robotics applications all semester at college using LabVIEW 2010. I can’t tell you how many times it has just crashed. NI has acknowledged some of the issues, but has not issued a fix.
One of the crashes is from using the cleanup tool. I’ve also had some random crashes while just using the program and also opening saved projects.
Now, I have not really used 8.6 that much, but I would wait for NI to fix some of the bugs first before giving it to a large mass of students to use.
I could see a lot of teams being very mad at competition when their Classmate just crashes when getting ready to run.
This is just my experience though. YMMV
The LabVIEW product family is constantly having features added, bugs fixed, and new hardware support added. Each new version is evaluated for use in FRC, and there is no rule as to how old or new the version needs to be. Instead, the decision is based on stability, performance, and hardware support.
At the moment, 8.6 is still considered the best choice.
Greg McKaskle
Thank you, that’s good to know. I have also heard (as people might have noticed) that FIRST tries to be about one version behind the most current one.
Wouldn’t know anything about it, but in my opinion, that’s actually a good idea. It not only ensures for a more stable building environment, but also for a cheaper kit of parts I would imagine. And I’m ALWAYS for a cheaper kit of parts. Although 2009 would have been nice. It’s a bit of a pain to have to have 2009 and 8.5 loaded because of FTC and FRC.
Regarding the internal Robotics Library in the 2011 LV Kit, any of the beta testers know if we are getting a simpler way to program using the Jaguar’s CAN functionality.
The code itself will be basically the same, but the library is now included in WPILib so you don’t need to do anything special to use it over a victor, or normal jaguar control