LabView 8.20 highlights NIWeek kickoff
Rick Nelson, Chief Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 8/8/2006 10:15:00 AM
AUSTIN, TX. National Instruments kicked off the NIWeek show convened here this week by formally introducing LabView 8.20, the 20th anniversary edition of the venerable program. Since its introduction in 1986, the program has evolved into an object-oriented programming environment serving test, control, and embedded-system-design applications.
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LabView 8.20’s capabilities are based on the underlying hardware capabilities. “New high-bandwidth buses, such as PCI Express, are giving virtual instrumentation and desktop computers the power to process enormous amounts of complex IF and RF data in communications applications,” said Truchard. “With LabView 8.20, engineers can intuitively develop design models and measurement applications through a graphical-programming notation that naturally represents the data flow of communications systems.”
That data-flow approach existed within the first version of LabView, which LabView architect Steve Rogers demonstrated with a dusted-off '80s-era Macintosh computer and a copy of LabView 1. He “wired up” an application in which parallel strip-chart recorders captured the output of random-number generators.
Software engineer Stephen Mercer then demonstrated how the same wire-based approach continues to exist in LabView 8.20 but also described the benefits of the 1500 engineer-years of effort that led to LabView 8.20’s development. His demonstration showed how a complex pattern-recognition and counting program could be quickly switched from serving one application to another. In his demo, a program able to count bacteria in a Petri dish was quickly converted to one that could count red blood cells—all through a single wire substation to sub-virtual-instrument code segments that describe the corresponding shapes of bacteria and red blood cells. LabView 8.20’s object-oriented-programming approach, he said, enables the rapid conversion of the program from one application to another.
Other LabView 8.20 capabilities demonstrated this morning included a DLL import wizard, an FPGA wizard, a Web services wizard, a LabView instrument-driver export wizard, and a math-script capability that allows existing scripts to be easily used within LabView programs. In addition, a new modulation toolkit provides a software-defined approach to communications system design and test.
Other features include the ability to let developers reuse m-file scripts created with The MathWorks Matlab software. It also supports an XML-based reporting standard for test data management (TDM).
