Announcing LabVIEW 2021

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LabVIEW 2021 is out now and available for download!

This new version of LabVIEW aims to continuously enhance your productivity with new features for interoping with Python and MATLAB, developing Real-Time and FPGA applications, and software engineering (VI comparison). Additionally, this release will improve your experience with enhancements in block diagram wiring, front panel visualizations, and preventing automatic execution in applications.

Key updates include:

• Python Support
• LabVIEW 2021 supports Python 3.6 through 3.9 and removes support for Python 2.7.

• Run When Opened
• When a user launches a VI that is configured to run when opened from a disk location other than standard NI installer locations, such as the LabVIEW 20XX or National Instruments\Shared folder, the user will be prompted to choose whether to run the VI or open it in edit mode.

• Licensing
• All LabVIEW Licenses include access to LabVIEW on any OS.
• Hidden Controls
• You can choose to show hidden controls while editing by selecting Edit»Show Hidden Controls While Editing. Controls are still hidden at run time.
• Use LVCompare with Git
• You can use LVCompare with Git to diff VIs. You no longer need a wrapper script to convert paths from relative paths to absolute paths before passing them to LVCompare.
• Improvements to Workflow for Comparing VIs and VI Hierarchies
• When comparing VIs or VI hierarchies, you can filter out various types of diffs interactively. Previously, you had to specify filters prior to launching a diff and had to relaunch the diff to change the filters. These filters include attributes, front panel changes, including changes in object position and size, as well as functional and cosmetic changes on the block diagram.

• Call MATLAB Functions
• Use the MATLAB functions to call MATLAB® code from LabVIEW.

• VI Names Listed in VI Abort Dialog
• When closing a project, deleting a target, or quitting LabVIEW, if user VIs are running, LabVIEW informs the user which top-level VIs will be aborted as part of that operation.

• Improved Wire Routing
• When drawing a wire between terminals, auto-routing leaves space between the wire and any unwired terminals so that you can wire the lower terminals without crossing wires.
• Improvements to the Probe Display
• Default probes for integer wires show the radix option in the probe display, which you can use to view data in decimal, hexadecimal, octal, or binary format, or SI notation.
• SFTP Support
• SFTP VIs and nodes allow users to securely interact with data and files on an SFTP server.

• Named Tuples Support
• When using the Python Node you can marshal clusters to named tuples so you can reference tuple items by name.
• nicurl Uses System Certificates on Windows
• nicurl uses the OS certificate store on Windows rather than its own HTTPS certificate bundle. Image
• Depth for GetImage and GetImageScaled Methods
• The GetImage and GetImageScaled methods now support a 32-bit image depth.

For more information, view the Release Notes.