Greetings and Salutations

[doobs]

Hello out there.

Once upon a time in a land far, far away, I was a LabVIEW Partner (don't think it was Partner in those days, but that's what it's called now).

As my professional activities drifted in a different direction, I've not done any LabVIEW in a while, but it's aways been near and dear to my heart.

Life brought retirement about 2 1/2 years ago, and I've been dabbling with a number of things in my "spare" time.

One of which is Home Assistant. Somehow, somewhy, HA has exploded as the thing in home automation.

It's support of devices is amazing. There are some 10,000 "integrations" available and more being developed every day.

The downside is the "programming" as they call it.

Oi.

I'm not a programmer, and don't play one on TV, but I'm conversant in a plethora of programming tools, including LabVIEW.

HA purports to be able to do everything via it's UI, but the ugly truth is, the really useful screen elements (they call them cards) don't have UI connections. It's all YAML. (Yet Another Markdown Language)

OMG. This stuff hurts my head in a spectacularly large and significant way.

There are two "segments" to HA, Dashboards and Automations. Automations I can "kinda" do, but Dashboards are a nine line cluster.

It took me over a week to build a simple UI with 5 screen elements to control the volume on three audio devices in my house. And that was with the help of some kind soul on the forum that took pity on me. Without his help, it simply wouldn't have happened. I could have crafted this in 20 minutes with LabVIEW, or python.

So, what I have been doing is some automation stuff for the house. Due to my lack of knowledge of the ins and outs of automations, and the documentation is 12-24 months behind schedule at any point, I've had to break up what is effectively a state machine into about 10 discrete automations. And as you would expect, I'm running into issues with them interacting with each other.

So, I've put together a textual descriptive of what I want to do and have been investigating the best way to do this in HA. What virtually everyone uses for these types of "flows" as they call them is NODE-Red. There is much to like about NODE-Red, but the first thing it reminded me of was LabVIEW. So, for laughs, this morning I went looking, and lo and behold found the Community Edition, and a version to run on Linux as a cherry on top. I'm migrating all my activities that I can away from Windows, as none of the computers in my house will run Windows 11.

So, while I wait for NI to figure out why my e-mail is not verified, I have to ask:

Has anyone had any interaction with HA? Any thoughts about interaction between LV and HA?

Take care

Edited Monday at 03:01 PM by doobs

[Jordan Kuehn]

I am a LabVIEW programmer professionally for the last 16 years. I also run Home Assistant in my house. It's great, but yeah the dashboard customization can be a bit hands on. I'd recommend their forums as well as facebook groups. They may have a Discord as well, but I've not joined that. I'd recommend not to attempt all of this in LabVIEW. While the automation logic might seem easier in your native language, the integrations alone are an incredible obstacle to rolling your own solution here. You may also want to look into HACS which is an alternate "app store" type extension for HA that allows for additional integrations and cards. Good luck!

[doobs]

37 minutes ago, Jordan Kuehn said:

I am a LabVIEW programmer professionally for the last 16 years. I also run Home Assistant in my house. It's great, but yeah the dashboard customization can be a bit hands on. I'd recommend their forums as well as facebook groups. They may have a Discord as well, but I've not joined that. I'd recommend not to attempt all of this in LabVIEW. While the automation logic might seem easier in your native language, the integrations alone are an incredible obstacle to rolling your own solution here. You may also want to look into HACS which is an alternate "app store" type extension for HA that allows for additional integrations and cards. Good luck!

Thanks,

I'll be honest, I'm allergic to Discord. Vehemently so. To the point where I refuse to use it.  Just seems like a lot of unfiltered noise to this old man.

I'm gonna play with NodeRed and see if it's the tool of choice. 

And oh, back in the day I was a National Instruments Alliance Member. Dunno if that's still a thing or not. 

Cheers,

Edited Monday at 04:04 PM by doobs

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

On 10/27/2025 at 5:03 PM, doobs said:

Thanks,

I'll be honest, I'm allergic to Discord. Vehemently so. To the point where I refuse to use it.  Just seems like a lot of unfiltered noise to this old man.

I'm gonna play with NodeRed and see if it's the tool of choice. 

And oh, back in the day I was a National Instruments Alliance Member. Dunno if that's still a thing or not. 

Cheers,

They still have something akin to the Alliance Member program. Not sure if it is still called that. Used to work at one too, but am now in academia.

As to running LabVIEW directly on a HA, that is not currently possible. Well it may be possible with some emulation if you get an x86_64 emulator running on your ARM HA hardware but that is:

1) a major project to get running, with lots of obstacles, many tricks and a huge chance that what worked yesterday suddenly fails for unexplainable reasons

2) a taxing solution on the poor ARM CPU in your typical HA box

The current Hobbyist Toolkit is maybe the most promising solution at this point. It can deploy compiled VIs to a Raspberry Pi and run them headless on the Raspi. But as it is now it's a bit of a pitta. It requires its own chroot environment to provide an ARM environment that is compatible with the ARM CPU in the low cost NI RIO hardware. This is distinctively different from the ARM binary mode typically running on your Raspberry Pi or any other modern ARM hardware. It is 32-bit, and uses the so called softFPU mode where FPU commands are emulated on the ARM core itself, rather than using Neon or similar FPU hardware integrated in all modern ARM chips. And new Raspberry Pi OSes including what HA is using (when running on Raspi hardware) have all changed to 64-bit nowadays, which is with the current Hobbyist Toolkit still a bit of a hurdle but can be worked around if you know what you are doing.

There is some talk from NI that they may maybe support a native Raspberry Pi version of this, where the LabVIEW program is deployed to the actual Raspi itself rather than into a chroot container on the Raspi. If that is ever going to see the light of the public, how and in what form is completely unclear. There are several challenges, some technical such as making sure the LabVIEW runtime properly can interact with the window manager on the Raspi (that should be fairly trivial as it is the pretty much the same as what LabVIEW for Linux needs) but also more economical/marketing: How to justify the effort and cost of developing and especially maintaining such a solution without any tangible income in the form of hardware sales? Making it an extra licensed feature is also not very feasible, people are usually not willing to pay 100ds of bucks for a software license for something to run on a 50 to 100 bucks hardware platform.

And even with that, your development would still be on a Windows box, in the same way as you develop code for the NI RIO hardware, where you have that hardware as a target in your LabVIEW project. Writing VIs and debugging them happens on your Windows box and when you are confident that it works, you deploy the resulting compiled VI code to the target and let it run there. This so far only works under Windows. And porting that to a Linux host is a major undertaking that I'm not sure NI has invested any real effort into so far.

Directly running the LabVIEW IDE on the Raspberry Pi is probably even more unlikely to happen any time soon.

Edited 12 hours ago by Rolf Kalbermatter

[doobs]

Thanks Rolf,

This sounds like a LOT more effort than I want to engage in.

cheers,

[hooovahh]

41 minutes ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

As to running LabVIEW directly on a HA, that is not currently possible. Well it may be possible with some emulation if you get an x86_64 emulator running on your ARM HA hardware but that is:

1) a major project to get running, with lots of obstacles, many tricks and a huge chance that what worked yesterday suddenly fails for unexplainable reasons

2) a taxing solution on the poor ARM CPU in your typical HA box

My HA install is running on bare metal computer, which is an 8th gen I3 embedded PC, 8GB of RAM 250GB SSD.   Here is the install instructions.  I wanted a bit more performance, and a company was throwing these computers away.  Besides this can give me more head room to do other things if I ever want to.  There's even an option to install HA on windows, but it mentions it in a VM specifically.  Nevermind, this is explaining how to have it on Windows, which involves having a Linux VM.

[doobs]

22 minutes ago, hooovahh said:

My HA install is running on bare metal computer, which is an 8th gen I3 embedded PC, 8GB of RAM 250GB SSD.   Here is the install instructions.  I wanted a bit more performance, and a company was throwing these computers away.  Besides this can give me more head room to do other things if I ever want to.  There's even an option to install HA on windows, but it mentions it in a VM specifically.  Nevermind, this is explaining how to have it on Windows, which involves having a Linux VM.

I've got a HA Yellow dedicated device with a RPi CM 4.

Some time back I bought two HP EliteDesk machines I bought on the cheap that I use for a plethora of "homelab" things, including my favorite self hosted app; Trilium. Both of these machines are running Ubuntu server with Docker/Portainer managing containers. The EliteDesks were cheaper than RPi 5's with all the necessary accoutrements to be self standing. So, something of a no brainer.

cheers,

[ShaunR]

This all sounds very awkward for a home automation GUI.

Why would you compile software on the target? Surely all the devices are wifi with their own REST API so you only need an aggregating web server with pretty javascript front end. What am I missing?

[Jordan Kuehn]

34 minutes ago, ShaunR said:

This all sounds very awkward for a home automation GUI.

Why would you compile software on the target? Surely all the devices are wifi with their own REST API so you only need an aggregating web server with pretty javascript front end. What am I missing?

I think you are describing Home Assistant well. There's some GUI driven scripting with YAML on the back end you can do, but it's designed for regular home owners, not just programmers. People make some pretty slick dashboards. Once I finish getting mine how I want I'll probably wall mount a tablet to display it in kiosk mode in a room or two.

But to try to integrate LV with HA? Not for me.