Keep supporting NI-CAN

[labviewman]

Today I discovered NI has discontinued support for NI-CAN hardware (not XNET) beyond LabVIEW 2015SP1.   If you want to use your code with NI-CAN hardware and LabVIEW 2016 and beyond, you are out of luck unless you have the cash to buy XNET replacements and want to rewrite your code for the XNET API.

I have a very large J1939 simulation/monitor application I wrote and have supported for the past 8 years that is used on several lab benches and by numerous software developers across the country.  Now, we stuck with LV2015SP1 forever unless we can find a large amount of cash to replace all the NI-CAN hardware, which isn't going to happen anytime soon.

So, my idea is for NI to keep supporting NI-CAN in current and future versions of LabVIEW

[labviewman]

I see NI-CAN 18.5 was released on 1/25/2019, but it only officially supports LabVIEW 2018..."Support for later versions has not been validated at the time of this release".

Does the lack of subsequent releases means that NI-CAN is now dead?

[crossrulz]

Not necessarily.  NI is going through some reorganization and some drivers are being slow to release this cycle.  VirtualBench is a prime example.  Hopefully these issues and delays will be cleared out for the 2020 release cycle.

[Evan_S]

Hi labviewman,

To your original question on "note 3" in the readme of NI-CAN 18.5, this refers to the fact the readme now states support for:

LabVIEW (32-bit)

2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and later3

This means that NI-CAN can be installed with future versions of LabVIEW, however at the time of release (January 2019) future versions were not available for validation. As new versions are released, NI may do validation to ensure these work but the readme typically does not change.

We do not currently plan to release a future version of NI-CAN, as the current version is expected to install and work in future LabVIEW versions (like LabVIEW 2019 for example which was released after NI-CAN 18.5 but is also compatible). If an NI or customer discovered issue exists, NI will consider a future release. Please also be aware that NI-CAN is currently in the "Mainstream Support" phase and will be moved to "Extended Support" likely within 3 years.

I want to also include a note on hardware lifecycle for anyone who finds this post in the future. PXI and PCI NI-CAN hardware had a last orderable date of March 2016 and is obsolete. USB NI-CAN hardware had a last orderable date of January 2020 and is in the "Mature" lifecycle phase.

We strongly recommend moving any new applications or applications that will need consistent updates to NI-XNET products. To make this easier the NI-XNET Compatibility Layer allows NI-CAN code to be used on NI-XNET devices during any transition period as well.

Migrating NI-CAN Applications to NI-XNET

If you have any detailed questions feel free to direct message me as well.

Best,

Evan_S

Product Manager

Communication Buses