Using a remote device (tablet, phone, etc) to provide a user-interface for LabVIEW

[Greg-H]

Hi Vito,

Web Services requires Microsoft Silverlight which is why it does not work on iPhone, iPad, or Android since they do not support Silverlight.  You are correct in saying that Web Services is not currently supported on Mac OSX and is also not supported on Linux.

Regards,

Greg H.

[RDR]

There is also a cross-platform smartphone toolkit from T4SM, here:

http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/210042

[Roger1]

Try using the IP address instead of "localhost". Find your IP address by running "cmd" and using the command "ipconfig" in the DOS window.

[msna]

Hey,

I guess the NI Web Services is a good solution. I have used it for the same purpose and I should say that my answer to your questions is different:

Match to selection criteria:

1) Client can be a standard web browser without any plug ins? No Yes

2) Minimal coding (in LabVIEW): No (Client side programming required) Depending on the graphics you can get away with minimal HTML / JS /etc. coding.

3) Inexpensive? Yes Yes

4) Client able to have push buttons, indicators, images and graphs? No (not without a lot of work) Yes and it's not alot of work. One way that this can be done is to share the variables from your main application, then you have to have a server application which is hosted by NI Web service. The server application can access the shared vairables. And finally the web services can be accessed by the client through a web interface. It might sound complicvated but it is NOT.

5) Fast and efficient? Yes (I imagine that there is little network traffic required.) Yes.

I hope that this helps,

Cheers

[vitoi]

Thanks mnsa for your reply. Good to hear from someone who has used NI Web Services.

Just to make sure I understand.

1) Can NI web services be used with my iPhone as the Client?

2) Are you saying that the HTML/JS coding is all done at the Server side?

It would be great to see a simple example. Something that puts up, say, a numeric indicator and numeric control on a remote web browser. This would be very handy for people to evaluate NI Web Services. And to understand it. Anyone out there able to put something like this together?

[msna]

Hey Vitoi,

1) Can NI web services be used with my iPhone as the Client?YES

2) Are you saying that the HTML/JS coding is all done at the Server side?YES

See  the attached screenshot from my iPhone. This is a real-time feedback from our server application in an iphone browser (HTML5/JS?AJAX on the server). The web page allows querries from our database and has a very intractive user interface.

Cheers,

[vitoi]

mnsa,

That's great. I wish I knew how to do it all, but when I chose a path, if NI Web Services is the way to go, I'm sure I'll learn it all ... eventually.

Can the software you have/developed send information (like button presses) back to the Server?

Am I right in saying that NI Web Services basically provides a mechanism for multiple Clients to attach to a Server. And if so, if there was only one dedicated Client then basically the same software could be used without the NI Web Services. Not that I would want to do it this way, but it will help me in my understanding and provide a development path to get this going.

Pity there isn't a simple example for me to try out that I can get working.

Thanks for the info mnsa, much appreciated.

Regards,

Vito

[vitoi]

Following from mnsa's input, NI Web Services match to selection criteria:

1) Client can be a standard web browser without any plug ins? Yes

2) Minimal coding (in LabVIEW): No (Server side HTML/JS/etc programming required)

3) Inexpensive? Yes

4) Client able to have push buttons, indicators, images and graphs? Yes (share the variables from main application)

5) Fast and efficient? Yes

So, looking better - take a look at mnsa's screenshot up two posts for a real world application. While others are discussing the merits of various methods, this one's out there being used for a real-world application.

[Daniel-H]

Hey Guys,

Thanks for revisiting this subject. I'm excited about the interest in HMI with remote devices.

For the OSC side of things, I wanted to make everyone aware of the work we are doing at National Instruments.

This is a link to our community page about OSC:

https://decibel.ni.com/content/groups/osc

Feel free to get involved by joining the group, posting on project discussions, and uploading projects of your own.

If anything else, download the beta of the new OSC subVI's for development. We'll be in the package manager as soon as we get things polished up.

We're currently working on a guitar effects project over OSC using a cRIO and the TouchOSC app:

We're also exploring other apps and their interaction with LabVIEW over OSC.

There's an example included in the package download that's a great starting point for those interested in developing some applications.

We're excited to see what you guys come up with.

Daniel

[montanaro2012]

Hey everyone an especcially Vitoi who openend this post,

I found your posts really interesting and helpful. I´ve been looking at the same kind of things getting really cunfused from the different solutions to the problem. This morning I somehow came to the conclusion that Web services would be the correct way to work and be platform independent and be able to separate the business logic from the presentation logic.

As you said, I can´t find any proper examples eighter and I would really need to know how far web services can bring me and if it makes sense to loose all the time doing research.

We also develop home automatisations for hotels were we control everything from the lights, to the air flows,the heating... Until now we used to work on a TCP Server Clients structure, which meant to develop te Server application and then the client appplication which results in super complex programming with many possible errors on both sides... somehow I think its an obsolete technologie and hope that webserver saves me some time. The good thing was that using TCP Server Client I could control the clients (different touch screens), their access and update their values in almost realtime, so that a light turned on by one client would show as "on" on the other client almost at the same time. How would this work with different clients connect through a browser to webservices.

So if you please have any example and if you could tell me if it makes sense to start working with web services I would be very grateful

thanks,

montanaro