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LabVIEW for Linux on single board computers (e.g. Beaglebone)

I know, but something is wrong with that model if it doesn't serve the needs/wants of an increasing number of their existing customers.  I'm certainly not alone in my desire to run LV on embedded targets other than NI H/W.

And this is were everything you say goes wrong. While it would be certainly nice to use LabVIEW Everywhere as they had it some time ago as marketing slogan, doing this on non-NI hardware will have very little return of bucks for the bangs NI would need to invest in this. You are not the only one wanting that, but the numbers of those who would do it and cash out several 1000 bucks extra every year for this aren't that big either.

LabVIEW always has been a tool to sell hardware and not a cash cow in itself, but doing what you request from NI, would take out the hardware sales and increase LabVIEW sales only very marginally. It would be in fact diametral to sustaining good share prices, since those analysts don't care about how many devices will run Powered by LabVIEW (TM) but how many dollars that will bring into NIs pockets. So complaining about NI share prices in this respect in fact only weakens your position further.

PS: The 30% drop you claim happens to be in respect to the all time high of the NATI stock. If you disregard the intense (+30% outlier of last year and compare it to a longer period, NATI does compare fairly well to both NASDAQ and Dow Jones. As a single stock it obviously has bigger outliers both positive and negative to an index that is an agregate of quite a few different shares. If you take Apple as a comparison everybody else does bad in comparison to that with several 100%. Just to show what % numbers mean.

Rolf Kalbermatter
My Blog
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Message 11 of 34
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My conclusion following this dicussion is: LabVIEW is great on the desktop, but when it comes to the embedded world, NI has nothing to offer.

Message 12 of 34
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I would say it depends how you define embedded.

If you mean low cost 3rd party single board computers, especially running Linux, then you are absolutely right. Chances that this is going to change anytime soon are virtually nonexistent, since there is no business for NI there.

However looking at the SBRIO platform for instance there is certainly an offering from NI that can be used for embedded applications.

Rolf Kalbermatter
My Blog
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Message 13 of 34
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By "embedded" I mean everything but the desktop. This includes LabVIEW Embedded for ARM and the various LabVIEW RT/FPGA platforms. (Possible exceptions are LabVIEW PDA and similar, since I have no experience with them.)

The closest to suitable embedded offering from NI is the sbRIO platform, but it falls short for reasons that will be explained shortly.

I have used cRIO to develop test equipment. This was started about 8 years ago and at the time it was felt to be the right platform. We've built 14 of the test equipment and each of them cost about $15,000, with cRIO making up about $6,000 of that. Today, there's an effort to build more, but at a lower cost. The target cost is $5,000 to $8,000, which will be hard to achieve when the cRIO costs $6,000   The sbRIO should be able to let me achieve the cost target, however, NI only sells them with a minimum quantity of 100. So, once again NI's marketing is getting in my way. (There are ways around this.)

If I was to start the development of the abovementioned piece of test equipment today there are many more capable platforms available at a fraction of the cost of cRIO and with much more processing power. The BeagleBone is just one example. You can also do some powerful processign with multiple microcontrollers.

Currently, we are about to develop a hand-held test instrument that we are building several hundred of. The target price of the test instrument is $1200, with $200 budgeted for the main processor/module. This precludes the sbRIO since its starting price is about $600. In any case, the size of the sbRIO is too large to fit inside the required case. So, in the end sbRIO was ruled out based on price and form factor. We examined LabVIEW Embedded for ARM. A great concept and it would be perfect, except we found that only about 10% of the microcontroller’s processing power was left over after the OS/LabVIEW overhead. We would gladly accept this by moving up to a more powerful ARM9/ARM11/etc processor, but NI only have ARM7 and Cortex M3 microcontrollers on offer. It took me 2 months to evaluate LABVIEW Embedded for ARM and I dearly wanted to use it since I like programming in LabVIEW. However, much to my frustration, it was not suitable. So, what did we do in the end? We’ve decided to use two ARM Cortex M3 or similar processors (one to perform hard real time and the other to handle everything else) with programming in C. Cheaper, more efficient and with much more support - albeit not in my favourite programming language. (I'm even going to dabble with .NET Micro Framework just to see how it fares for future development.)

sbRIO

The sbRIO is getting close to a good embedded platform, however it has several problems. None of them are technical and could be resolved by NI, but once again, it’s the marketing that gets in the way.

1)     Minimum purchase quantity of 100. Assuming I only want the processing functionality, the cheapest sbRIO board is about $600. This means that a developer would need to spend at least $60,000 in sbRIO boards. The same level of performance can be obtained in a SBC that retails for $150 (actually, much better can be achieved, but let’s keep this conservative). So, a developer has to spend an extra $45,000 for the NI solution. What do they get for their $45,000? My estimate is that in a typical development effort of 1 man-year (requirements capture, system design, detailed design (hardware and software), hardware design, programming, unit test, integration test, system functional test and documentation) I will probably save 2 months of effort by using LabVIEW. That’s about a $25,000 development effort saving. So, sbRIO is not cost effective – at least for 100 units. And the cost benefit gets worse if I’m building more.

 

     To me, sbRIO makes sense if you are building about 10 units. (For 1 or 2 units, cRIO makes sense.) Once you get beyond a few dozen, it’s better to switch to one of the very capable and open source boards and C or .NET Micro Framework. Incidentally, regardless of how many units are projected to be built, I have found that we always build more. So even if someone tells me the most we’ll ever build is 10, I use 20 (or 40) in my buy versus build analysis.

2)     Price. As detailed above, for more than about 10 units, the price is a problem.

3)   Form factor: The sbRIO has all the communication connectors installed. This means that your product must be developed around the sbRIO rather than the sbRIO fitting into your product. The way I would like it is the way the ChipworkX Module does it (http://www.ghielectronics.com/catalog/product/123). This is a sub-credit-card sized boards that readily plugs into your product and also has a development board that has all the communications connectors, display etc. This is a true OEM approach.

4)   Price is not on the website. This makes it difficult for me to compare boards or make a business evaluation.

There is an opportunity here for NI to have a compelling product. The recently released Xilinx Zynq chip will allow NI to have an OEM friendly form factor. The board could be sold in single quantities for $150 each and there would still be a healthy gross margin of over 50%.

Xilinx Zynq

The Xilinx Zynq chip is both NI’s greatest opportunity in the embedded space and its greatest threat. The opportunity is to develop and market the board mentioned above. The threat is that if NI doesn’t do it, someone else will. The Zynq chip will result in an integrated development environment that targets both the microcontroller and the FPGA. What this will look like I don’t know, but it will happen.

LabVIEW Embedded for ARM

If NI develops LabVIEW Embedded for ARM to target a contemporary high-performance board (such as the BeagleBone) it would have a winner. I believe the performance issue can be resolved. My investigation has put the poor performance to an (expensive) context switch once per loop iteration. If this is the case, each loop could have another input called “switch iteration” it would be possible to select the appropriate number of loops before a context switch is initiated.

I’m sure technically NI could have a powerful product here. However, once again, marketing …

National Instruments' share price

NI’s share price has been dropping. Not over a select period of 1 year, but over any period over the past year. Relative to the Nasdaq, it has fallen 20.6% over the past year, 13.5% over the past 6 months (~27% annualised) and 7.4% over the past 3 months (~29.6% annualised). So, no matter what time period you take, it’s about a 2% decline each and every month. This is significant.

A company’s share price is the universal score card. It is the true reflection of its underlying value and cannot be manipulated (unless there is (illegal) false information). It can deviate for a short time, but it must come back to represent the true value of a company.

C Code Generator cost

The C Code generator cost is prohibitive. There was a mention that this compares favourably with EDA tools like FPGA compilers, however my search has found that FPGA development systems range from free to $2,500. The C Code Generator is at least an order of magnitude more expensive.

Risk Mitigation

My strategy is to become proficient in LabVIEW (desktop, RT, FPGA and Microcontroller) and C/C# (.NET Visual Studio C# desktop, .NET Micro Framework and Code Composer Studio C). This is to ensure that each time I embark on a new project I have the skills to target the development environment and platform that makes the most business sense and not to be restricted by a limited skill set. This is particularly important since LabVIEW is a proprietary product with effectively no competition to drive innovation and pricing. I would suggest that all developers that include LabVIEW in their arsenal should also do similar to ensure they target the best development environment and platform on a case-by-case business case.

Conclusion

Don’t get me wrong, LabVIEW is great on the desktop, but when it comes to the embedded world, NI has nothing to offer. NI could fix this, but chooses not to. I consequently am broadening my skill set. It will make me a better engineer. I hope that for the next project in about a year’s time things are better in the LabVIEW camp, since programming in LabVIEW is fun.

Message 14 of 34
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This is an interesting and constructive post for sure. I'm not sure I will hold my breath for NI to support a BeagleBone type board. Whatever board they would choose, it would be considered by a majority of potential users as the wrong one, for varying and sometimes very arbirtrary reasons. Besides of the fact that it does not give NI much sales in the end.

The Xilinx Xynq chip most likely is already in their development labs and gets a full workout in various ways. If there will be a product with it is another question, but it fits much better into the NI business than a BeagleBone board. NI won't comment on this yet, until they have a product ready to show on some event like NI week. And it of course takes some time to come up with such a product, as developing the hardware is not enough. There needs to be done quite a bit of complicated development work and testing for the seamless integration with LabVIEW.

Betting only on LabVIEW is certainly not a good idea. You need to keep your options open although I'm sure that betting on MS in the past for our development environment would have much more often forced us to change direction than NI has. MS has this tendency to introduce a new technology and evangelize it as the newest all in the world development paradigma, only to abandon it after 5 to 10 years to be replaced by yet an even "better" one, with less than ideal migration paths. The days of .Net are already getting counted!

Rolf Kalbermatter
My Blog
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Message 15 of 34
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I'm happy to have my development paradigm changed every 5 to 10 years (as long as it's better). At the moment the .NET offerings are a lot cheaper, have a larger user base and accordingly better community support.

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Some quick comments/opinions after following and reading this post's trail:

1) I see repeated comments about the NI cRIO and sbRIO high hardware costs -- and how at those costs, mass munafucturing is not economically feasible using those plaftorms -- this is an ABSOLUTELY TRUE statement. There is most ALWAYS a trade off.  By using NI hardware, the software can be developed more quickly therefore offsetting the PROJECT cost and getting to a market more quickly. For a 'productized' device, yes, hardware cost can and should be reduced.  Software development cost WILL go up because the time to develope the software will increase related to the development environment required. But, with that cost being spread over multiple units, the total product cost would be reduced.  A little common sense a econ 101 has to be applied. 

2) A comment was made that LabVEW is used to generate hardware sales.  As my teenage daughter would say 'DUH!'.  I believe if you go back through the history of LABView, the purpose was to provide the scientist/engineer a method to take a 'device' and quickly have data WITHOUT being a programmer.  LABView was a software product to support and boost hardware sales. 

3) And my FINAL comment -- because of a project I am currently working, I KNOW that groups within NI understand holes in their offerings.  And, because of the group with which I'm working, I KNOW that there is an interest to fill those holes.  But, again, Econ 101 dictates that it MUST make sense and have a return on investment.

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I also agree that LabVIEW not only generates a large amount of NI's revenue (my estimate is 40%), but it also results in the majority of hardware sales. My estimate (and NI are very secretive about these matters) is that over 80% of NI's earnings is directly or indirectly from LabVIEW sales. Just take a look at the NI Idea Exchange; 91% of all posts are for LabVIEW. LabVIEW is National Instruments and National Instruments is LabVIEW.

It is interesting to hear that NI understands that there are holes in their offerings and that there is interest in filling those holes. Over the past 3 months I've spend a lot of time reviewing NI's offerings in order to work out the direction for our future developments, which will mainly be in the embedded arena for the next few years, and came to the same conclusion. What NI needs is some innovation and a paradigm shift in their marketing. It's been a long time between innovations with the last that I can identify happening over 8 years ago (Events in LabVIEW, cRIO and LabVIEW for Microcontrollers - that's it).

NI's current dilemma reminds me of a similar situation at a company I previously worked at. We had a lucrative contract to deliver a product that we knew we could rationalise using the latest chipsets and dramatically reduce in size and cost. We saw this as eating into a profitable part of the business. We lost the entire contract to a competitor. I learnt an important lesson back then - look after your customers and the profits will come.

I feel for NI and their marketing decisions. Which way to go? All I can say is that I'm glad that I have a much larger world to select my embedded development environment from. And the offerings are much more exciting than when I last did embedded development over 15 years ago.

Message 18 of 34
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This is what the next sbRIO should look like:

1) OEM board: http://www.enclustra.com/en/products/embedded-processing-modules/mars-zx3/

2) Development board: http://www.enclustra.com/en/products/base-boards/mars-pm3/

Mmmm...

Message 19 of 34
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I've put an entry in the NI Idea Exchange for the smaller and cheaper sbRIO based on the Zynq chip: http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-FPGA-Idea-Exchange/Smaller-and-cheaper-sbRIO-based-on-Xilinx-Zynq/id...

Please vote if you like the idea!

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