News and New Products

Package provides integrated development environment for heterogeneous distributed systems

By Dan Strassberg -- EDN, 10/4/2005

According to John Pasquarette, National Instruments’ director of software marketing, LabView 8, the latest release of LabView, is the most extensive revision yet. NI developers have been working since 1998 on some of the new features. The company’s goal for the product is to provide an integrated environment for developing heterogeneous distributed systems for design, design verification, test, automation, and control. Such systems can take many forms, some of which incorporate subsystems of multiple types, including conventional PCs; intelligent modular instruments, such as PXI (PCI extensions for instrumentation); distributed I/O, such as NI’s Compact FieldPoint and Compact RIO (reconfigurable I/O); PDAs; and custom-designed system components based on FPGAs. Like earlier versions of LabView, this release supports hardware from a broad spectrum of manufacturers, including NI’s competitors.

To bring the many disparate elements under the LabView umbrella, the new release focuses on its ability to measure within minutes after installation, thanks to newly enhanced LabView Express features; streamlining application and device management by means of the LabView Project software module; and designing, distributing, and synchronizing intelligent devices and systems. At the heart of these functions are features that are either new to this release or that constitute major improvements over their counterparts in earlier releases.

LabView 8 includes extensive capabilities for locating hardware and software resources that you may want to incorporate into an application. Examples are networked instruments and driver-software modules that reside on networked computers. LabView Project searches the network for these modules, allows you to select them for use in your project, and tracks the availability of resources that you share with another developer or project. Whereas the term “LabView Project” may make you think of the Microsoft Project (www.microsoft.com) project-management tool, the two have little in common. Although it can show you whether another developer is modifying a software module that you wish to use, LabView Project provides no configuration-control functions. It does, however, work with most popular configuration-control packages.

NI offers LabView 8 in a low-cost student version; prices for base, full, and professional, versions start at $995. Add-on components include a PDA module, which costs $995, and FPGA, real-time, and data-logging/supervisory-control modules, each of which costs $1995.