MarkCG

I remember reading somewhere that the idea behind LabVIEW was to make data acquisition as easy as creating a spreadsheet. That is anyone with some ability to use a computer and understand basic math could create something that worked for their purposes without being a programmer. Gradually more and more complexity and capability was needed and the professional LabVIEW programmer emerged, similar to how professional Excel/VBA programmers arose in the financial industry. But like everything the need for the professional LabVIEW programmer was a product of particular historical circumstances, and I think history has moved on. Since many big companies have invested a lot of money in NI hardware we will be some demand for LabVIEW programmers to maintain these system, but it will taper off over the decades. I think it will be like COBOL -- you'll have a few crusty old guys wading into ancient codebases to make fixes and smaller changes but no greenfield development. I may be wrong but I think NXG is NI's last gasp attempt to stay relevant and that it will fail. The attitude in most companies I have experience with is that "not owning your source code" is a major, major problem, and I don't see that changing. LabVIEW is seen as a sometimes necessary evil only. If NI wanted LabVIEW to stay relevant for years they would make it open-source, and keep selling hardware and software add-ons for it. But they know their business better than I do and what's good for me isn't necessarily good for them.

Is there anything like Xcontrols in NXG? I didn't think there was

Interesting, Beckhoff controller with NI hardware is the inverse of what I did. Going forward I can't see a situation where would use the NI EtherCAT chassis unless I needed to take advantage of the custom FPGA programming or maybe needed the special shock/vibe ratings. I really got shocked when I discovered how many more practically useful features the Beckhoff terminals and EtherCAT boxes have vs the NI C series modules and how cost effective they are. For example 50/60Hz bandstop filtering is selectable on all the analog inputs. This is something you have to implement in FPGA for C series or buy a specific module with filtering (9209?). Or short/open circuit detection on digital output modules. Using the "EtherCAT box" modules eliminated large amounts of control panel wiring and harnessing, and still cheaper on a by module basis.

at least it doesn't crash as much as it used to

Thanks Rolf. The NI EtherCAT master leaves A LOT to be desired but I've successfully got it to work with Beckhoff EtherCAT terminals, even in star topologies. Fortunately I've gotten away from needing to deal with 5 different communication protocols to talk to random devices lately, as I've been able to control what hardware is used . Did you ever develop code in the TwinCAT/Visual studio environment and deploy it to a Beckhoff Industrial PC? How was that?

Hi all, I was wondering if anyone here has had experience doing machine control with both LabVIEW and TwinCAT (not in the same project or machine) . I've been working with Beckhoff hardware and I'm impressed, and I'm curious about how the TwinCAT software compares to LabVIEW as far as ease of use, stability and bugginess, and the power and flexibility of the programming languages available, that is how versatile it is compared to a compactRIO, where it seems you can do pretty much anything. Also how does it compare to LabVIEW+ LabVIEW RT + LabVIEW FPGA software stack from a cost perspective?

would you say the system is easy to set up or does it basically require someone dedicated to running it full time?

what kind of data rates and number of tags can it handle?

we got it to work on cRIO https://sourceforge.net/p/labview-zmq/discussion/general/thread/87780372ed/

should we add Network Shared Variables to this list of left hand scissor features as well?

I'm interested in learning more about it-- can we see the presentation? I have never installed NXG but this sort of thing is what would sell me on it. My superficial impression has been that it's, at this point, LabVIEW with vector graphics.

Makes sense. To me it seems DCAF if very close is so close to doing everything I want it to, I'd hate to add yet another layer on top of it. Honestly my feeling is that all these frameworks are great but they are all using a lot of complexity to transform and stretch LabVIEW into something completely different from what it was meant to do originally. There has to be a better way, were Actors , state machines, tags vs command vs streaming data, and easily handling thousands of I/Os are fundamental concepts of the language.

That's great, I had no idea! I'll take a look at it at least and see if I can maybe come up with something similar.

I use DCAF for most of the things running on compactRIO. I like it, very easy to write static modules, much harder to write dynamic ones where it works correctly with the configuraton editor, though I have done it. Nice to be able to manage tags with CSV files. My biggest gripe about it is that there is no built in events / messages/ triggers. So if you have a module that needs to perform some sort of sequence that you want to initiate on user command, you have to do something hacky like increment an integer tag, or change a boolean tag's state. I guess you could also do that with RTFIFOs or queues, sending this kind of command data from outside or even inside the framework but I have not invested any time in that, and seems like it would be hard to debug.

Daniel, thank you so much for sharing this and bringing it to my attention. So what someone would have to do is create a program that reads in a protobuf specification text file, and then uses VI scripting to create a VI that encodes a specific message, using the VIs in the library "protocol buffer encoder". Seems like the sort of problem that you can break down recursively-- once the protobuff specification is parsed into a tree. you start at the root and recurse down the tree till you get to a leaf node. Generate code for all the leaves, then as you recurse back up wire the leaf code together. Easier said than done though...