JayParnell Posted September 3, 2003 Report Share Posted September 3, 2003 Hello Just been in a meeting with our customer, hammering out costs for a piece of test equipment that we intend to develop. Based the estimate on project which was developed in LabVIEW v3.0 - even though new project will use V7.0. The question was asked by the customer - "yes, but how much more efficient will the software development be now that we are upgrading to V7.0". This was a curveball I wasn't expecting, and I am frantically looking for a quantifiable metric with which to respond. Any help would be appreciated. I've been in contact with NI and they will get back to me, but I suspect their reply will be "sales pitch" based, and probably a little rose tinted. I was after some more meaty figures from the guys who use it (I've never used LabVIEW before) In anticipation..... Quote Link to comment
JackHamilton Posted September 3, 2003 Report Share Posted September 3, 2003 Jay, LabVIEW 7 DAQ is about 20x faster than earlier version of LabVIEW. Also the DAQ cards themselves are faster than before if they are concerned with data acquisition speed. NI now has a 100/Ms card!. But the real speed increase will come more from the computer hardware upgrade than anything else. The speed difference between a 486 and a P4 is orders of magnitute, including AGP video and 100mb ethernet - things are just plain faster now. This is also not a valid arguing point; as you don't want to invest developing a system based on obsolete components. Forget about LabVIEW 3.0 - are they going to keep a copy of Win95/98 around and a PC to run it?. The DAQ ISA cards are not avaliable either. That said: I'm curious about your statement of not knowing LabVIEW? Are you in sales? Quote Link to comment
Michael Aivaliotis Posted September 4, 2003 Report Share Posted September 4, 2003 The key point here is the question by your customer "how much more efficient will the software development be". This is really a moot point since LV version 3.0 is not supported anymore. It's just like saying how much more efficient is it to work with WinXP vs. Windows 3.11? Can you quantify that? It's unfortunate that you cornered yourself like this. Does the customer really have a choice in using LV3.0? Not really, you need to explain this to them. I assume they are trying to reduce the cost of integration by pointing out that you will be able to develop the project faster and cheaper in LV7.0. LabVIEW is still LabVIEW. You still use wires to connect objects and you still have a front panel and a diagram. On the other hand, NI has introduced several wizards that allow you to acquire and view data using only 3 nodes. In essence, you can develop a system in 5 minutes!... Or can you? I'm not sure what you are developing and how the new LV7 features will benefit your development. You need to discuss this with your internal engineers and decide how much of a savings you really have. Assuming you are a systems integrator, you probably have a library of code to dip into or old projects to recompile. This is where your real savings are, in code reuse. Quote Link to comment
JayParnell Posted September 4, 2003 Author Report Share Posted September 4, 2003 Thanks guys for your replies - these coupled with a webpage I found will help me come up with something. Jack - no not in sales - I'm a software engineer, but my background is ADA/UML/Shlaer Mellor. Just come off of the back of a 7 year project which used UML / Shlaer Mellor and ADA 95 to implement a large software project. Currently trying to get my head around test equipment - it's all new to me. Quote Link to comment
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