cRIO silverlight remote panel replacement

[andre.buurman@carya]

Probably not the right board, but is there going to be/ or already a replacement for current cRIO remote panels based on Silverlight?

Which LV version and cRIO drivers would be required in that case?

[Christina_R]

There is not a direct replacement for remote panels on cRIO. You can, however, set up some communication (e.g., with web services) and create web interfaces using other products (e.g., G Web Development Software).

If you'd like to tell me more about your use cases, it would help NI refine our investment plans in this area. Remote panels were a quick way to get a web UI, but many customers have told us they desire a more customizable UI.

I'd be happy to set up a call/email if you'd prefer to provide feedback offline.

[Hooovahh]

Yes the remote front panels were a bit limiting.  But I think the ease of use, caused me to be fine with the work arounds needed to get a decent working UI.  When developing RT applications I'd often have my main VI work with polling value changes on controls, so that the remote front panels could be used and tested in the development environment.  When I went to deploy the whole application, I would just expose these as web pages.  In a couple of current projects we still do this with a legacy version of IE because it required no extra development.

I could re-write the application to use Web Services, but I'm not a web developer so I'm not sure how I would even start.  There are several 3rd party options some of which work on RT, for automating the creation of the web page. 

Most of the web pages needed for interacting with hardware can be very simple.  If NI release a new version of the web publishing tool, but had modern web standards, not relying on Silverlight, then I would be happy and use it.  Even if that meant all the previous limitations.  10 years ago Microsoft made it clear Silverlight was going away.  Since then all I've ever wanted was the same web publishing simplicity, but usable in a modern browser.

The webpages for other hardware is very simple.  Most LXI power supplies, programmable loads, and even routers and switches, are all very basic.  I'm really just looking to make pages like that.  Fancier pages with drag and drop, or right click menus, or stuff is nice.  But for me it is primarily manual control of things, and viewing the status.

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[Mads]

When someone mentions replacing Silverlight my first thought is not about remote panels, but the web interface to manage RIO system settings. We typically use it to verify connectivity, see CPU usage, adjust the network or time setup, check the image on it etc, and right now it is getting difficult to use the current interface as only legacy browsers allow Silverlight (you can get it to work in Edge, but you have to jump through a few hoops, not something we want to explain to every user).

The more we can do just pointing a web browser at the RIO device the better, if we could develop a full blown GUI for our application and make that the startup page but with the system settings as an extension shown only to admin-logons would be even greater..so there we are back to remote panels, replaced by WebVIs then?😁

Having to ask a client to install NI Max just to do some basic adjustments is not practical...(and with the current solution NI Max depends on Silverlight too...).

[crossrulz]

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@Mads wrote:

When someone mentions replacing Silverlight my first thought is not about remote panels, but the web interface to manage RIO system settings. We typically use it to verify connectivity, see CPU usage, adjust the network or time setup, check the image on it etc, and right now it is getting difficult to use the current interface as only legacy browsers allow Silverlight (you can get it to work in Edge, but you have to jump through a few hoops, not something we want to explain to every user).

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Copying from a private board.  This is information that should be made more public.

If you haven't seen it already, we're shipping a new (non-Silverlight) version of the Web-Based Configuration and Monitoring tool for targets starting in 21.0. If you use a System Image software install on x64-based targets, there should be 2 options for NI Web-Based Configuration and Monitoring - 20.5 and a newer version (21.0+). The 20.5 version is the old Silverlight tool, while the 21.0+ tool is new and works in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Edge. You can currently have both installed side-by-side.

[Mads]

That is big news yes.

2021 was the first version ever we skipped (since LabVIEW 4.0) because the news we could find in it did not justify the nuisance of the upgrade itself (and loss of compatibility with older RIOs..), but I had not seen this feature.

[andre.buurman@carya]

Hi Mads,

A bit off-topic, but could you elaborate a bit more on the loss of compatibility (links, etc). Very interested, currently not to happy with troubles we seem to encounter with the newest cRIO driver set and LV 2021.

Thanks.

[andre.buurman@carya]

I migth have mixed up terms a bit.

We typically use remote panels as an easily accessible (Vi server method to call it from a desktop app) debug UI. An other use case is to prevent the need to create a desktop app with UI, just need a small support app that can open the remote panel. 

My biggest issue with remote panels is the version incompatibility I regularly encounter.

I wouldn't mind having to create e.g. a webVI (although would be nice to select the SystemLink API as optional package, due to all required services involved), but then I would also need to implement a webservice to interact with the main code. Would be neat if we could turn on a generic webservice that can act like the VI server interface does when reading an indicator or setting a control value on a cRIO frontpanel. Like Set_Control_Value (VI name, Control name, Value). 

[Mads]

Support for "older" cRIOs/sbRIOs are removed in each upgrade so you simply lose the ability to put the new RIO driver on them. Back in 2015 (I think..) we accepted losing the ability to develop for Fieldpoint units (we used cFP-2220s, they were pretty old then). Losing support for some of the sbRIOs is too early for us though. 

[andre.buurman@carya]

Ah ok, thx.

Our problem with older cRIOs and newest driver sets is that it seems to needs more and more packages to have a consistent image. Like 9066 has way less memory than 9056. Installing the same could make the 9066 useless because there's no room any more for an application. Specially now cRIOs are hard to come by we need to resort to older types that customers scavange from unused setups.