The Future of LabVIEW

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There are a lot of discussions currently going on about LabVIEW Everywhere. The interest level is high. This has got me thinking about the right and wrong way, from a customer’s perspective, that National Instruments could implement LabVIEW Everywhere and profit from it, mainly by increasing the LabVIEW user base.

LabVIEW Everywhere Done Right

1) Introduce an inexpensive, OEM friendly single board RIO based on the Xilinx Zynq chip. Target size is SO-DIMM form factor (68 x 30 mm (half the area of a credit card)). It would have to be less than $250 in quantities of one and less than $150 in quantities of 100. (http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-FPGA-Idea-Exchange/Smaller-and-cheaper-sbRIO-based-on-Xilinx-Zynq/id... )

2) For LabVIEW Embedded for ARM, port a popular, contemporary Tier 1 board (out-of-the-box experience), such as the Texas Instruments LM3S9B96 development board. At least the marketing has been done by Texas Instruments since the product brochure mentions that it runs LabVIEW!

3) The ability to use a standard web browser as a user interface for LabVIEW (without any plug ins)

Later another popular developement boards such as Arduino Due, Raspberry Pi or BeagleBoard could be targeted as a Tier 1 board and iPhone, iPads and Android devices could be considered as targets.

LabVIEW Everywhere Done Wrong

1) Keep sbRIO at its current form factor, performance level or price (or anything above $300 for the simplest board).

2) Keep marketing the LabVIEW C Generator for $50,000. It expensive and cumbersome to use. Unless it can be sold for less than $1,500 and made to one-click target multiple targets this product will never sell (outside academia).

3) Abandon LabVIEW Embedded for ARM (LabVIEW Microcontroller SDK and LabVIEW Embedded for Blackfin are already no longer available).

Proposed sbRIO SO-DIMM form factor (68 x 30 mm)                         Proposed sbRIO developemtn base board                  Texas Intruments LM3S9D96 Developement Board

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Comments welcomed.