Michael Aivaliotis

I've tried the Pi4 it works no problem. No idea about the Pi Compute. However it has the same CPU and guts of a Pi3, which also works, so don't see any issue.

That's a good question. I know it's not officially supported in the LINX documentation. I think it has to do with the type of ARM processor used on the zero vs the Pi 4 (for example). I just received a Pi zero, in my hands and will be trying that out soon. So I'll let you know if I find out anything. I remember seeing some info by someone in the community working on this and will post any info i find. Edit: LINX toolkit does not support Pi Zero. If you need a small form factor Pi then look for a device with the same or similar CPU.

I thought I'd reply to this thread for posterity. LabVIEW Community Edition is now fully released starting today. Just to summarize: LabVIEW 2020 and NXG 5.0 are part of the release. Includes everything that comes with LabVIEW and NXG Professional Edition, Including App Builder (exe builds). No watermarks or feature restrictions LabVIEW NXG Community Edition includes the LabVIEW NXG Web Module Extending SystemLink Cloud evaluation to 6 months during 2020 LINX toolkit included with install. Supports: Arduino via serial port. Digilent uChip board RasPi and Beaglebone Black as LabVIEW targets via Ethernet Port. You can build/deploy a LVRT application on the above targets (RasPi and Beaglebone Black) and run headless. Exact same process as traditional NI embedded targets etc like cRIO. You can use the LINX toolkit separately if you need it for commercial usage. Just install it on a non-community system. The license for LINX allows this now. License allows usage for anything and everything except: NO Commercial use. If you want to do commercial work, buy a full license for your business or use your company's license. NO College University courses/labs (post-secondary). Academic Site Licenses apply in these cases. Note: Students and teachers in K-12 classrooms can also use LabVIEW Community and LabVIEW NXG Community. License is activated through your ni.com account and lasts for 1-year (renewable each year). Clear definitions are detailed in this link. *Arduino is only serial support (not a target)

Hey LAVA friends. I'm going to be doing a live-stream on Youtube next Tuesday April 28, (10AM Pacific) to go over LabVIEW Community Edition. I'd love to see you guys there. It'll be interactive with chat for your questions, and I will be making an attempt to talk to a Raspberry Pi and Arduino. If you're curious about low-cost hardware or just want to find out what's new in the latest LabVIEW. Join me here: https://youtu.be/4HLVqYXpxIo. Edit: If any of you have done any projects with the supported hardware. Let me know and I can mention you or pull you into the discussion. - Thanks.

If you want to try LabVIEW, you can download a free full version of LabVIEW for non-commercial use. It contains the LINX toolkit so you can use Arduino, RaspBerry Pi and Beagleboard: Download LabVIEW for Free

Ok, now your idea has 2 votes... 😀 Ya, I decided to delete them all manually, and also the Update Service installers, which are probably temporary packaged files for the update service.

I work with VMs and monitoring VM drive space is one issue I look at every now and then. The "C:\ProgramData\National Instruments" folder on one of my VMs is using 40GB. Does anyone know the proper way to clean up the NI crap? Using SpaceSniffer, it show the bulk of it is used by the Update Service and NI Package Manager. I'm sure it's just leftover installers that may be needed.

Don't forget cRIO has RT so you can implement a lot of programming on the RT side for various scenarios. As a master of the LabVIEW language and NI hardware. I would prefer a platform that allows me to use the language I already know and love. I can provide a PC application that implements anything the customer desires. then I can configure a cRIO and implement ECAT, serial, Devicenet, DAQ, DIO or whatever they want using the same language and skills. If NI does not support the desired hardware i need to talk to, they have many other options like DLL calls and other ways of interfacing that I still have not found a specific limitation that I was not able to workaround to get the job done and still make the customer happy. Yes, there are other languages and opportunities. Anyone who has worked with ECAT has heard of Beckhoff. They pretty much came up with the standard and are pushing it across the industrial world. It's just another communications standard. NI and LabVIEW are at a whole other level above and beyond that. Can NI improve the tools they provide for ECAT, DeviceNET and others? Yes! There are some features of ECAT that the NI tools simply cannot access or configure. A lot of what NI implements is the basics of the industry standard. They rarely go above and beyond unless customers push for it. They have a checklist of industry compatibilities they try to maintain so the marketing looks good. So they still can do better. Recently they started adopting TSN which is very powerful and allows synchronized DAQ across cRIOs and cDAQ chassis. Technology is constantly evolving and I commend NI for always trying to keep LabVIEW on the forefront by providing hardware that keeps up with todays requirements. So as you can obviously tell from this post, I am not going to convert to TwinCat any time soon. However competition is always healthy and keeps companies like NI on their toes to make sure they are always providing value to their customers so they don't start wandering off to other solutions.

What I would like to see is a way to minimize the map or set constant by double-clicking on it. Like you can do with cluster constants. Hand editing Maps is such a small use-case but useful for some I guess. You usually work with these things programmatically. Thanks for the tool.

i get it. Sometimes you gotta patch and move on. In parallel, though, I'd open a ticket with NI to get them to spend some resources on worrying about your problem too.

Can't you just add the numbers and divide?

I made a workaround. Instead of typdefing the entire Map, I just typedef the datatype inside the Map. This is probably the best way to do it anyway. Similar to typedefing an array element vs the entire array. Regardless, however, this is still a bug. Thanks for looking into it.

Ok this is so random how I found this, but I was able to reproduce it. I'm hoping others on here can reproduce it as well. If this is a known issue then please link to the source for reference. I've attached code that reproduces it. But basically in order to reproduce it: Place a Map datatype in the private class data of the class. Make the Map datatype a typedef. lava.zip

I'm noticing that when I probe LV class wires in LabVIEW 2019 SP1, it won't display any data on the probe. In fact it appears as if that part of the code never executed. I just can't figure out how to reproduce it. I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed this behavior. I can clearly see that I have multiple probes on one diagram and the probe attached to a class wired shows "Not Executed" in the probe watch window, even though "Retain Wire Values" is enabled. LabVIEW restart does not fix it. classprobe.mp4

It was not developed in a bubble. There was already a close relationship between the VIPM team and NI. So they knew the requirements and the need. It's been over 5 years since the release of NIPM, so not much movement however... That might have been the first step, but hardly the long-term plan. In reality, I think the main reason for lack of development on NIPM is that people got shuffled around and new management came in and the original development plans for NIPM got put on a shelf. I can tell you that NI had the goal of full VIPM replacement. There is much churn internally at NI on where to take NIPM next. They are back to wanting to add features to facilitate better reuse library installation for current LabVIEW (how to achieve this is not clear). For sure however, this is the clear case with NXG. I suggest you watch this video:

NI caused this problem themselves. NIPM should have provided all the features of VIPM from the start and then added GPM features. Lack of investment. Now they're playing catchup, but technology is moving on.

Well, it seems to be more of a back, than a front. GitHub is becoming the package repo. GitHub is not making a front end manager. Agree this would be hard or impossible to achieve. Ok, ya this is a more attainable goal and a possible path forward. But GPM is not widely adopted and has limitations. NIPM will win by default, because it is made and fully supported by NI. However, it has a long way to go to support all the features we (as developers) need. It's a dumb installer and has no smarts related to the LabVIEW environment. For example, you cannot target LabVIEW by version and cannot allow up compiling of code. NI is investing resources to make it better over time and we need to keep pushing them to add features we need. However, NI moves like a big company does, very slow. There are currently 3 package formats: VIPM, NIPM and GPM. It's a mess, and by reading this thread, it seems people are open to ditching packages all together.

I feel this is somehow related. GitHub supports packages as described here: https://help.github.com/en/github/managing-packages-with-github-packages Do you think this is something that we can utilize for LabVIEW package distribution?

GPM extracts code into your project, BTW. VIPM, NIPM and GPM provide built products of reusable code, among other things. I believe what you are saying is that you consider existing, cloud-based source code control tools such as GIT as a viable option for reusable code distribution. This shouldn't be limited to packaged stuff.

I agree. I don't store those type of file in the repo for a while now. My specific comment was about how to transition from one large files extension in Mercurial to Git. I use Bitbucket Downloads. However, I'm finding that different file sharing tools can be useful for different use-cases. There's really no one-size fits all.

I sign all my built EXEs, for all my customers. It's trivial to do and doesn't cost much. This also allows me to know if the application that I'm asked to support was built by my company or the customer did the rebuild themselves.

What's the reason for moving to Github? I was using Kiln to host my code, which used Mercurial. I switched to Bitbucket with Git. I had to migrate many projects from Mercurial to Git. I did the migration using the HG-GIT extension: https://hg-git.github.io The main problem I encountered was using the "large files" Mercurial extension. The automatic import tools provided by GitHub and others don't like that extension and barf. Otherwise you can use the web migration tool provided by GitHub. My workaround to the large files problem was to accept the fact that I will lose the revision history on those files. Not a huge deal, since most large files I had were installers and binaries that didn't have revisions per say. So after the migration I did a diff on the project folder, identified the large files, which were missing from the new Git project and just copied them over and pushed them up to the Git repo. Don't forget that the core GIT functionality is the same regardless of service provider. So let's say you found a way to import your repo to GitHub, you can easily turn-around and move it to GitLab, bitbucket or whatever. You're not locked-in. But it might be an issue if you are using an extension that only one service provider supports. The future is GIT. I made the jump over a year ago and haven't looked back. The service provider you choose should give you the tools you need to do your job. The reason I picked Bitbucket was because I liked and used all the other products that Atlassian provides, JIRA, Confluence etc. The tools from Github are a bit weak for my business. I also like companies that continuously improve and invest in their products, among other things. Github seems to be the popular choice for open-source, since that's how it got started. Now that Microsoft owns them, perhaps they don't have to worry about generating revenue (don't know if it's good or bad). But I don't see features that compare to what Atlassian offers.

Published 10/29/2019 See here: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/national-instruments-announces-plan-ceo-200200768.html AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- NI (NATI) today announced that Alex Davern will step down as Chief Executive Officer of NI, effective January 31, 2020. The NI Board of Directors has appointed current President and COO, Eric Starkloff, as NI President and CEO, effective February 1, 2020. Davern will take up a teaching position at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business starting in the Fall of 2020. Davern will remain on staff at NI as strategic advisor to the CEO through May and will continue to serve on the NI Board of Directors. Board Chairman Michael McGrath said, “The board appointed Alex as CEO in 2016 to lead the transition from our founder, Dr. James Truchard. Over the past three years, he led NI and shaped a new core strategic vision, expanded our strategy to provide more complete systems for our customers, aligned the company to focus on growth industries and delivered record results. The board’s intention, after a successful transition from the founder, was to appoint the next CEO to lead the company to achieve this new vision. After considering alternatives, we unanimously selected Eric as our next CEO to lead NI into a very promising future. Alex will leave NI stronger, with experienced leaders and a clear strategy. We are excited to have Eric as our new leader as he has proven to the board that he is the most qualified person to take NI to the next level.” Davern, CEO said, “I have thoroughly enjoyed being part of NI’s incredible success since joining in 1994, one year before the IPO, and I am confident the company is well positioned to deliver on its growth strategy. I am proud of the progress our employees made in significantly improving our operating results and we have developed a team of highly experienced leaders. I have worked with Eric for many years and have great confidence that as CEO, he will continue to take NI forward to realize the company’s long-term potential.” Starkloff, President and COO said, “It has been an honor to work alongside Alex for the past 22 years and I want to thank him for his mentorship and his significant contributions to NI. I am confident in our strategy and our team, and I believe we are in a position of strength to deliver on our goals. I look forward to taking on the responsibility of CEO, as we connect our deep engineering experience and software-connected systems with our incredible customers who are taking on the complex challenges shaping humanity.” This leadership transition will be discussed during the Q3 2019 earnings call today at 4:00 p.m. CDT.

Does this mean the Actor Framework functionality will now be represented graphically in NXG, as apposed to a list of hundreds of class VIs in a tree in the project?

Just watched this presentation by Richard Feldman called: Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm. As I was watching this, many ideas came to mind about how LabVIEW stacks up in various areas of the presentation. I wanted to hear what the community thinks about this. We can all agree that LabVIEW is NOT a popular language (as defined in the video) and it probably will not end up on any presentation as the one in this video (I desire for this to change though). However, I think the discussion in the community about FP vs OO is currently taking place. I know people that do not use OO in LabVIEW and many that swear by it. So I think this is a fitting discussion. However, the core question of the presentation as put by Richard is "Does OO features make a language popular?" His argument is NO. I don't think OO by itself will make LabVIEW popular, but where does LabVIEW end up on the reasons for popularity as presented? Or better yet, what can make LabVIEW more popular? Is that something that anyone should care about?