Does any teams develop Labview software on Apple computers. If so how do you go about getting Labview onto there computers. Currently my teams school requires all students to have an apple laptop. This is great since everyone has a laptop. The only problem is getting Labview onto there computers currently requires use to put windows on there computer then install Labview. This process takes a very long time. Anyone have suggestions?
We used Labview and the driver station on a MacBook last year using Bootcamp. You can also use Parallels for Mac and run it in that virtual machine. Which is what I recommend.
does bootcamp or virtual machine cost anything? How long does it take to set up and is it easy to use?
Bootcamp is free. Parallels isn’t. But it’s pretty useful~.
And of course you have to pay for Windows…
Bootcamp is pretty straight forward to install and use.
But with parallels, you can install as many OSs a you want (or can fit) and you can use Windows at the same time as OS X. Which is pretty cool.
sounds good we will give those a try. Do you have any tips on how to get labview on computers faster? Right now we just use one disk and pass it around but it take a while
For multiple computers it’d be faster to copy the installation files to local disk (~ 5 min), then install from there.
The installation takes just as long, but the LV installation disk can be passed along as soon as the files are copied over, which is a whole lot faster than the actual installation process.
great idea i will keep that in mind
is there any way to us labview without Windows
The FRC version and license is only for Windows.
Since FIRST provides Windows licenses for the Driver Station Netbooks, it would be rather nice if they provided a licenced Windows VM with all the necessary software installed (Microsoft is a sponsor aren’t they?)
Well, at $2,699 it’s not likely to be feasible to simply purchase it for the team, but NI has offered LabVIEW for the Mac since 1986. Too bad they do not offer this OS as an option through FIRST.
As Mark stated, only the Windows version of LV supports the RT module. For a few years, RT support was available on the Mac as well, but the demand wasn’t high enough to justify the test and release overhead.
Greg McKaskle
OK, so the native Mac version is not even compatible with FRC. Too bad. Love my Mac. Have to live with Parallels to get Windows.
Compatible is not quite the word I’d use. LV VIs are portable across different platforms, but they may not compile or run. The mac no longer ships the utilities and libraries needed to target a cRIO or other RT device.
So yep. My mac spends a good percentage of its time in parallels too.
Greg McKaskle
it sounds like my team will need to keep using parallels. Any suggestions on a good way to get windows to students. buying a version of windows for everyone wanting to learn LabView on the team is not in are budget due to are software team growing. We are debating moving to java for this reason. We really do not want to though due to are great experiences with Labview
Giving windows to every studio IS very expensive. We just switched to Java this fall for the same reason (not that we have many Macs but that Java is not platform dependent). It’s not a bad choice because we actually liked developing in Java; it’s a good start for programming in the industry.
Do you have any good source to learn more about FIRST and java. How hard was the transition?
I don’t know details, but MS donates Win7 licenses to FIRST. I’m not sure if they are only for the new classmates or can be used on other computers.
Above URL also seems to be an option. At the bottom it seems that you may simply need to ask.
Greg McKaskle
This is a fairly good resource that provides overviews from various programming concepts both basic and advanced. Also, the videos on Brad Miller’s YouTube channel are awesome for actually learning how to code a robot fairly well, no previous Java experience required. You will notice that there are 2 sets of videos, one of which involves regular Java programming and the other involves java programming with robotbuilder. Robotbuilder is a tool that allows you to put in information about your robot and what you want it to do, and it will generate a good chunk of your code for you based on the information. It makes it so that you do not have to actually type much actual code, just plug in a few numbers into the interface. It can be a bit limiting if you want to do some fancier stuff, but you can always just bypass the robotbuilder and code that part of the robot the old fashioned way. I am a new coder, so I don’t have any experience with either method, but from what I know about robotbuilder I would definitely encourage a team just starting with Java to use it.