Community Edition Compatibility with full license.

[rellufdarb]

I have fully paid Labview 2017 installed and have had good success with my projects, both 32 and 64 bit.

I would like to explore the possibility of Raspberry Pi and Beagle Bone deployments for my yacht and have just downloaded the Community Edition. Before I hit the install button I would like to know if I can have both versions (Labview 2017 and Community 2020) sitting side by side on the one PC without any problems.

[billko]

Personally, I would hesitate to mix the two, because you shouldn't mix business with pleasure.  😉  I like to have very rigidly defined work and play boundaries, and that includes software installs.  In previous multi-license installs, the latest install license always wanted to overwrite the previous ones.  I don't know if this is still true.

The main issue I have (and I don't know whether this applies to you or not) is that you could run into some IP issues if the company you work for owns one LV install while you own another.  Best to stay far away from that rat's nest, and the best way to do it is to keep your work stuff on a work computer and your stuff on another.

[RTSLVU]

Well you don't need the Community Edition just to get Arduino, Beagle Bone, and Raspberry PI compatibility .

All these are part of LINX and unless NI has done something recently to LINX to make it NOT work with LabVIEW 2017. All you have to do in install LINX using the JKI Package Manager.

BTW: Until LabVIEW 2020 I had NO problem having multiple LabVIEW installations on one computer. NI hosed something in the NI Package Manager that comes with LV 2020 that makes it a P.I.T.A. 

[rolfk]

Actually while that is true for Arduino (where you do not deploy LabVIEW code to the controller but simply communicate with a (customised) Arduino sketch on the controller), this does not necessarily hold true for the Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone Black. Yes you can run them in the same way as an Arduino too, with a custom application written in your prefered standard Raspberry Pi IDE and just communicate to it through Linx over TCP/IP or serial, but I'm pretty sure most want to use LabVIEW on these controllers with directly deploying LabVIEW code to the controller.

For that to work you need to install the according LabVIEW firmware to the controller, which installs a "chroot" environment in which the LabVIEW runtime will execute. The original Linx provided a debian image with LabVIEW 2014 runtime, there was an image with LabVIEW 2019 runtime for the Community Edition Beta begin of this year and there is now an image with LabVIEW 2020 runtime. The runtime version on the controller has to match with the IDE version on your host or LabVIEW won't like it!

There are no ready made images for LabVIEW 2015 up to 2018. It may be possible to generate them by extracting the necessary files from a CompactRIO ARM installation, but aside from technical issues to identify all the correct files (several dozen or more) and figure out the necessary configuration file settings, there is also a potential legal issue with that.

[rellufdarb]

Yes, I am aware of, and have used Linx to communicate with Arduino----it is a good way to get good simple I/O to a PC. As you say, the same could be done with almost any microcontroller using serial port (I have done that too with good success).

I now want to deploy the Labview application to either a Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone. The speed, memory etc of these devices effectively puts them in the same league as a small notebook and I think with the ease of application development that Labview offers I could get something useful up and running-----I tried with Labview 2015 but never really got anywhere.

I think trying to install 2020 "alongside" a previous version might lead to trouble though, so perhaps a separate PC might be the (more expensive) answer.

[rolfk]

While I have regularly multiple LabVIEW versions installed alongside each other, they do use the same professional license. I could see the license manager getting into trouble to distinguish between your professional license and the community license on the same machine. AFAIK the license manager is not really able to handle that and will likely always use the highest valid license it can find.

You can install the Linx Toolkit into LabVIEW 2020 Professional (make sure to get the latest version, the one for LabVIEW 2014 will create trouble in a LabVIEW 2020 installation) and then get technically the same situation as what the Community Edition installer would put on your system. In terms of licensing it is still a Professional install and the commercial limitations of the Community Edition do not apply in that case.

The main problem is that only LabVIEW 2014 and 2020 have official Linx support. Anything else is likely going to be an exercise of frustration than anything else. The good news is that NI has stated that from 2020 onwards they have included the Community Edition support into the main LabVIEW release cycle and that every new LabVIEW version should be released with full support for it

[Intaris]

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@RTSLVU wrote:

BTW: Until LabVIEW 2020 I had NO problem having multiple LabVIEW installations on one computer. NI hosed something in the NI Package Manager that comes with LV 2020 that makes it a P.I.T.A. 

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It kind of depends how far apart the installations are from a time point of view.

We ran into all kinds of problems with LabVIEW 8.6 parallel to LabVIEW2012. The IDE itself was not neccessarily the problem, but the associated drivers were a nightmare.

[rolfk]

Well LabVIEW drivers always only support the matching LabVIEW version and 3 prior versions. In fact it will proactively remove support of the according LabVIEW support files from any version prior to that.

8.6 is one version to far away from 2012 in that respect (2012, 2011, 2010, 2009) and this is not only not a supported configuration but actively discouraged by the driver installers. Also trying to install DAQmx prior to 12.x will not recognize the 2012 installation and not add support for it, so if you want to have any kind of driver support in multiple LabVIEW versions, your LabVIEW installations should never be more than 3 versions older than your most recent version installed.

If you really need to support multiple versions of LabVIEW farther apart than that you definitely need to look into Virtual Machines. It's the only way to maintain sanity with multiple OS invasive driver installations like most NI drivers are.

[Intaris]

We moved to virtual machines a long time ago to circumvent exactly these problems. I only ever have one LabVIEW version installed on any given machine.

Which led me to a discussion with NI where the old licenses for LabVIEW explicitly prohibited the use of LabVIEW in a virtual machine.....

[RTSLVU]

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@rellufdarb wrote:

I now want to deploy the Labview application to either a Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone.

I think trying to install 2020 "alongside" a previous version might lead to trouble though, so perhaps a separate PC might be the (more expensive) answer.

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Well rolfk outlined most of the hoops you will have to jump through to get an actual LabVIEW application to run on an ARM based microprocessor. 

Good luck 🙂

As for multiple LabVIEW version on one computer I have had everything from LabVIEW 2014 to LabVIEW 2019 installed on my old computer before my company upgraded it and never had an issue.

Except for keeping my code base separated as the other programmers in my company don't think LabVIEW is important enough to use the source code control they use...