NI Releases LabView 2010

In preparation for its annual user conference, NI Week, National Instruments today announced LabView 2010, the latest version of the graphical programming environment for design, test, measurement and control applications. The latest version offers new features such as off-the-shelf compiler technologies that execute code an average of 20 percent faster than previous versions and a comprehensive marketplace for evaluating and purchasing add-on toolkits for easily integrating custom functionality into the platform. For field-programmable gate array (FPGA) users, LabView 2010 delivers a new Intellectual Property (IP) Integration Node that makes it possible to integrate any third-party FPGA IP into LabView applications and is compatible with the Xilinx CORE Generator. National Instruments also implemented more than a dozen new features suggested by lead users through the LabView Idea Exchange, an online feedback forum that marks a significant new level of collaboration between NI R&D and customers.

The compiler abstracts tasks such as memory allocation and thread management. The compiler hierarchy has evolved over the lifetime of LabView to become smarter and more optimized. With LabView 2010, the compiler data flow intermediate representation has been further optimized, and Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), an open source compiler infrastructure, has been added to the software’s compiler flow to accelerate code execution. National Instruments has conducted benchmarks ranging from real-world customer applications to low-level functions, and the new compiler delivers an average improvement of 20 percent across these benchmarks.

The LabView Add-On Developer Program establishes an online marketplace as part of the updated LabView Tools Network for developers to offer their free and paid toolkits and a comprehensive location for LabView users to browse, download, evaluate and purchase the add-ons. More than 50 add-ons from NI and third-party developers are available, including code reuse libraries, templates, UI controls and connectors to other software packages. Additionally, LabView users can use the VI Package Manager from JKI to connect directly to the LabView Tools Network from their desktop and manage add-on installations and updates.

Additionally, National Instruments has partnered with leading technology providers such as Xilinx to further open up the LabView environment. One example is the new IP Integration Node, which makes it possible for users to integrate any third-party FPGA IP into the LabView FPGA Module and offers direct compatibility with cores created with the Xilinx CORE Generator.

During the development of LabView 2010, NI R&D used the new LabView Idea Exchange on www.ni.com/ideas to solicit feature ideas from customers. In addition to submitting new ideas, customers can use the exchange to collaborate on suggestions submitted by others and vote on their favorite features. Fourteen popular submissions from the LabView Idea Exchange were implemented in LabView 2010 including many that improve code documentation and organization.

PLCopen meets OPC

I'm not in Germany this week, so I'm not attending the SPS Drives show. (Man, that would have put me over the top for Platinum Elite on Continental, but also put me over the top for divorce court, too, maybe.) I'm watching for Carl Henning's "tweets" from the Profibus point of view. But meanwhile, Tom Burke, OPC Foundation president, sent a note about a collaboration effort between OPC Foundation and PLCOpen--the keepers of the IEC 61131 PLC programming standard.

In this case, the organizations and their members are demonstrating a mapping of the IEC 61131-3 programming model to OPC UA with five HMI and five control suppliers showing transparent data exchange using OPC UA in a boiler application.

NI Week 2009

The annual National Instruments "geek bash" called NI Week was held August 4 through 6 in Austin, Texas. President and co-founder James Truchard (Dr. T) greeted a record crowd in the opening keynote with a remark about how the "financial engineers" who helped create the mess we're in should go back and do "real engineering" to help get us out. "Math the way it's been taught in business schools has serious flaws." Warren Buffet, he said, called it a "false perception" of reality. In a later meeting with editors, he said that business schools are trying to apply the laws of physics to an area with a lot more variation.

Truchard used this a jumping off place to promote the added "real-time" math capabilities in the latest revision of the company's flagship programming platform--LabView 2009. The new release also moves LabView more heavily into systems design. Truchard then went on to tackle a Business Week headline about not enough innovation by pointing out the many ways LabView users have been innovating.

NI is a company that prides itself on technological innovation. Some companies may be sales-driven, a few may be marketing-driven, but NI is still a nimble, technology-driven company. And nowhere is this seen like the latest release of LabView and its supporting cast of hardware.

NI is a company that prides itself on technological innovation. Some companies may be sales-driven, a few may be marketing-driven, but NI is still a nimble, technology-driven company. And nowhere is this seen like the latest release of LabView and its supporting cast of hardware.

The latest generations of chips are fertile field for NI engineers. Intel's multicore microprocessors offer the opporunity to show off LabView's inherent parallelism. With LabView, programmers can target parts of programs to run on separate cores of the processor and then be reassembled to accomplish its task. For example, data acquisition and analysis could run on one core at the same time another core is driving the display. Meanwhile another core could be controlling some I/O.

My introduction to field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) many years ago was their application as a prototyping platform--not as a production microprocessor chip. That has changed. LabView has supported FPGAs for a number of years creating products than can change personality through software. Now, the company is demonstrating the power and speed of the devices allowing it to ramp up data acquisition speeds to a level unthought of a few years ago.

NI Co-founder and "father of LabView" Jeff Kodosky wondered during his keynote why computer science departments have not seized upon LabView for courses in parallel programming, since it's the only graphical platform for doing it. LabView is not inherently sequential as are text-based languages. It operates with parallel data flow rather than sequential control.

NI has dipped into the wireless sensor network arena--but in its own terms and in its own way. It unveiled WSN nodes build with IEEE 802.15.4 radios that connect in a "mesh" networking topology. The protocol stack is ZigBee with modifications for things NI needed, for example NI believes that computing devices communicate using Internet Protocol (IP), so its engineers wanted to incorporate that into the network. Mentioned almost as an aside is one of the most powerful parts of the entire system--LabView embedded on a node. It won't be a full-blown version of LabView, but it will be enough that a node can be a controller, or at least an analyzer of raw data, before reporting status and information back to the system.

SolidWorks has become a partner to the extent that "soft motion control" in LabView can team up with the computer aided design (CAD) environment at the design stage so that mechanical and electrical/control engineers can collaborate at an early project stage and see what a machine can do before cutting chips on the factory floor. This partnership has the potential for a powerful leap forward in machine design.