LabView vs LabWindows/CVI

[Dennis_Knutson]

The Developer Suite with the Automated Test option is the way to go. It's like LabWindows/CVI and the toolkits come for free.

[jyce]

Je reviens un peux sur le sujet au fur et a mesure que j'avance dans le tutorial. A premiere vu LV me semble effroyablement lent face a CVI. Vrai ou Faux ?

[jyce]

Oups i'm sorry about that, i was just so absord by what i was doing i did not pick the right langage 🙂

I'm goimng through the LV tutorials and i have the feeling that this is a lot slower than CVI, is it just a feeling du to the IDE and the VI/CVI runs at the same time or LabVIEW is a lot slower ?

[Dennis_Knutson]

In the majority of cases, I've been able to develop a lot faster. I once needed to develop both LabVIEW and CVI instrument drivers. Did the LabVIEW versions first and I spent significantly less time developing them than I did with the CVI versions.

As far as execution times, there might be some operations that one language is better at than the other but overall, I think they are comparable. I work mostly with serial, GPIB, USB, Ethernet instruments and LabVIEW and CVI use the same drivers so I would not expect to see a difference.

[LV_Pro]

Same underlying drivers. The phrase drivers gets a bit vague in our community, describing hardware level "stuff" or at least closer to hardware, like VISA, and what are loosely refered to as "instrument drivers" which are LabVIEW encapsulations of the various string commands for an instrument. That being said, the execution times are usually comparable and may be faster with LabVIEW as it will run on multiple cores simultaneously. I'm not sure if that is available with CVI.

[jyce]

From what i have seen with CVI, the designer is in charge of the multithreadings. Both of you looks convince that execution are the same so i'm gonna have to buy it. I guess the weight of the IDE for LV 2010 gave me a wrong impressions.

[JÞB]

Well this comes down to price- And read into it what you want

You can buy NI TestStand and LabWindows CVI for $x

You can buy NI TestStand and LabVIEW for about the same $  OR

You can buy Developer Suite (LabVIEW PDS  + LabWindows CVI For just over the price of LabVIEW PDS) and add Automated Test Option (TestStand + Signal Express and some other ToolKits) for a bit more that either.  PLUS the DevSuite media contains ALL NI toolkits so you can evaluate the ones you might benefit from as needs arise.  That last beney is a real honey when it comes to estimating project development for my customers! 

[ramulu]

Hi,

I'm working for a aerospace company. We need to develop new Test application. My background is C/C++ programming. We need to develop new Test application wither either LabView or LabWindows/CVI. I'm new to both of these. Pls. suggest me which one is easy to learn and develop?. Another important thing is, we need to maaintain this appication for next 30years. So, which one is easy to maintain, LabView code or LabWindows/CVI code?

Thanks

Ram

[tbob]

Labview is by far much easier to learn and work with than CVI in my opinion.  If you have a C background, that will not necessarily be true since CVI is C.  (CVI stands for C Virtual Instrument).  However, aerospace companies (I used to work for one) tend to lean towards C programming.  But if you have your choice, choose Labview. 

A comment was made earlier about multithreading and that the programmer has control of multithreading in C, implying that the programmer has no control over multithreading in Labview.  Not true.  I find multithreading in Labview much easier to implement than in C.  Put two loops without any wires going from one to the other and you have multithreading.  So simple.  Try that in C.

[jyce]

I've been giving more thinking about this. And i think i will push for divide and conquer. Development suite + Test Stand does not cost a lot more than LabVIEW or CVI + Test stand. It seems logic to keep all option opens. My idea is since production test does not requires GUI, we will develop test for Test Stand in CVI, so it is easier to show FAA how we handle those sources, and reduce the difficulties of configuration management.

And will advise to developp engineer tools for troubleshooting in LabVIEW since this does not fall under FAA scope.