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Showing content with the highest reputation on 06/02/2017 in all areas

  1. Please see this link for Video downloads The NIWeek 2017 Videos are uploaded to the ftp server. Please see this link for information on downloading the videos. https://lavag.org/topic/19154-ni-week-2015-videos/#comment-115444
    6 points
  2. The latest guidance, given to both customers and to LV R&D: development in the current platform will be increasing and will continue for the next few years. Not just bug fixes, but actual feature development. When NXG reaches maturity such that it is capable of being a full replacement for the current platform, it will be renamed as just "LabVIEW" and the current platform will move to some other name, TBD. That "full replacement" version is what some people call the "parity release", although parity is a bit of a misnomer since some features are being deliberately left in the past (front panel data socket, "Enable Database" on subVIs, to name two). If you hear about NXG reaching parity, it means the point where our most advanced customers can fully do their jobs with a UI that they're at least grudgingly happy about (Hoovah's graph of user happiness earlier in this thread is quite accurate, IMHO). From that rename point, there will be several years of support for the current platform: limited bug fixing and validation for new OS editions as they occur. How many years exactly will be communicated at that time, but it will be multiple. That's the summary. Now, to put some details behind that... I personally have at least 2 years worth of new features in the pipe. My personal attention is split, with about 15% to NXG and 85% to LabVIEW. There are a couple of teams with 2018 features, and I'm expecting to see a few more on-boarding for that and 2019. The majority of developers will still be working on NXG, but we will see a lot more life in LabVIEW. The new features will mostly (but not exclusively) focus on language developments, not editor developments. The language enhancements of channels and malleable VIs are both going to see improvements going forward. There are four new structure nodes being kicked around, one of which you've seen if you've seen the NIWeek or CLA Summit presentation on 2017 malleable VIs. For the other three, ask @lordexod... long experience tells me he's probably discovered their early footprints in the code. ;-) I said there would not be many editor developments. That's because the whole inspiration for NXG was to provide a new editor because the code in the current environment makes editor enhancements particularly cumbersome (30+ years of development makes for a lot of module coupling). Given that, it makes little sense to try to forge ahead with most editor improvements. But there are some editor enhancements that are worth doing, as you see from the live drag and the remove space enhancement of the last couple versions. There will be more ahead. Because the compiler and execution engine are shared between LabVIEW and NXG, there's a team working on optimizations to both of those, so you'll see improvements in those areas. The interest in improving run-time load speed has lead people to discover ways to improve load speed in the current editor... you'll see some of those improvements in 2017, more in 2017 SP1, and another few in 2018. That's as much signposting of the road map as I can give at this time. I hope this information provides at least some reassurance to the LAVA community.
    1 point
  3. At the risk of veering further off topic, we some times use an arduino or the like to bang out a quick proof, but you're right in that these never make it into anything real. The idea is that the microcontrollers that these platforms are based on have a many peripherals that can do most of the common operations I need to do in hardware without the need for an FPGA. For most of my applications a 100 MHz 32-bit CPU is serious horsepower when I have the heavy lifting offloaded to the peripheral hardware. When the on board peripherals are insufficient there's literally over a dozen communication options, often with several instances of each never mind the ability to tap right into the system bus on the more sophisticated µC architectures. Need to upgrade up the ADC? Fine, that's a $15 IC that will tap into the SPI bus. Easy. Repeat for a few other obscure needs that the built-in stuff can't handle and when all is said in done I have a board that does exactly what we need and costs maybe $200-$500 per unit at volumes of 10-25. While I have no problem building a single $5,000 NI platform to test something, scaling the volume is sometimes a hard sell. What happens when we need to make 5 more to move from proof to concept? Then 25 more to ship around the world for collaborators to test and bang on for a bit? It's hard to sweep numbers like that under the rug for lower visibility projects, but even for the high ones where it could fly, how do I fit one of those NI boxes in my widget that's supposed to be smaller than any of the NI chassis (except the SOM, obviously)
    1 point
  4. I've no idea what this means Well. It's a bit off topic but........ I used them for visual inspection. The RPi3 has a CSI-2 interface (many of these boards do). I think it was 4 lane (4Gbps) but I only needed two. You get wireless and HDMI for free. If you need a bit more processing power then you can add something like a Saturn FPGA for image processing (LX45, the same as in some of the cRIOs). The customer has tasked one of their engineers to investigate creating a GigE to CIF-2 converter because they eventually want to use and reuse Basler cameras on other projects but we were unable to find such a device (links please if anyone has them). They already had a LabVIEW program that they used a bit like NXG and I connected that to the sub system with wss Websockets. For the ultra low end devices, I use them to add data logging, HMI and watchdog capabilities to existing hardware (like the Wago that was linked earlier and cRIO). You only need an Ethernet port and HDMI for that and as a bonus you get more USB ports. There is a whole multitude of choices here - with or without Wifi, LORA, more or less USB ports and GPIO etc. The only lacking technology at the moment is availability of GB Ethernet but they are starting to come through now. These types of devices I no longer think of as "hobby" devices.
    1 point
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