LabVIEW
Labview Hilscher CIFX integration
mgharat@hilscher.in wrote:
Hello ,
I want to test Hilscher CIFX 50-RE card with Labview . But I want to understand which Labview sotware edition to be procured ?
Basically interfacing to DLLs can be in three ways depending on the type of DLL.
1) The easiest in terms of not creating crashing code is through the .Net functionality if your DLL is a .Net assembly. But the object oriented nature of those interfaces can be sometimes a bit involved and hard to see through. If you have existing .Net code in form of C# or Visual Basic code, you can however fairly easily translate them to LabVIEW.
2) Next is ActiveX, which is similar to .Net in terms of accessing it in LabVIEW, but nowadays pretty old legacy technology. Any hardware manufacturer offering nowadays an ActiveX interface to their hardware but no .Net interface, you know for sure their product is from the beginning of this century. Not likely something you want to invest any effort into nowadays.
3) Last but not least is the direct DLL interface. This is the hardest to get right. It requires you to understand pretty well how the API would be used in a C program, and in addition to that some not so trivial things about how a C compiler works when aligning data in memory to pass to functions. This last point is in fact less important in C as some of it is automatically taken care of by the C compiler. Also there is no common .Net Runtime with its memory management contract that LabVIEW can rely on when calling a .Net assembly. The management contract for a C DLL is whatever the API developer thought would be cool, no matter how cool it really is. And if you do not understand how that contract works, you are faster in crashing land than you can blink with your eyes.
Even the LabVIEW Base version is able to let you use either of these interfaces. And as long as you only are trying out things without creating any product or application with LabVIEW, you can also use the Community Edition.
