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Measurement Studio vs. LabView
Treckl
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03-26-2014 03:57 AM
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Hello,
does MS2013 (thats the latest version that comes with the DevSuit2014) offers the same native functionallity for WaveGraphs display and DAQ as LabView?
Never worked with the latter, but in my limited experience with with Measurment Studio for .Net I had the impression that the functionallity and performance (especially multiple real time graph display) is worse then the LabView aequvivalent.
Are both on par, or should I start looking into LabView programming ?
justwakingup
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03-26-2014 11:41 AM
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I have only used the WinForms Graphs, but I think both are on par as far graphing a relatively small number of points (up to a few thousand). Beyond that I think LabVIEW is going to be faster unless you implement your own decimation algorithm. My understanding is that LabVIEW has a decimation algorithm built in. The old Measurement Studio ActiveX controls were as fast or faster than LabVIEW so I'm assuming they had a form of decimation as well. After fighting with this myself I created my own decimation algorithm for the WinForms charts. I'm actually glad that the performance was originally poor because it allows me to better optimize memory usage. If you plot a million double precision floating point number you are going to use at least 8MB of memory. This starts to chew up a lot of memory quickly.
Anyways if you want to try it out the algorithm basically takes the minimum and maximum value for every x number of points. I keep the min and max values of the output array in the order they were found. It works really well and you basically can't tell the difference. The reason this is true is because you have a fixed number of pixels on your monitor. Plotting any more points than you have pixels is just a waste of time.
You can find the source code for my implementation at www.sourceforge.net http://sourceforge.net/projects/sdflib/ . That project is basically a charting utility for a bunch of different data files including NI TDMS. When viewing a data set the chart will automatically decimate the data to include the best number of points for the region zoomed. This is kind of like Google Maps where you get the big picture and can then zoom in to see the finer details.
I think the one area you might be inclined to look into LabVIEW is if you need 3D Graphs. NI has pretty much dropped the ball on the 3D charts in Measurement Studio. They used to have the 3D ActiveX control (not sure if it's still available) but there is no .NET equivalent.
