What is [or was] BridgeVIEW?

[tarheel_hax0r]

I chanced upon an old webpage that mentioned something called "BridgeVIEW".

I've googled a bunch, but I can't seem to figure out what  "BridgeVIEW" is [or was]. The pages that mention "BridgeVIEW" seem to be rather old, and it's not clear to me that "BridgeVIEW" exists anymore.

Was it some old National Instruments product that has since been discontinued, or continued under a different name, or maybe merged back into LabVIEW itself?

If it was discontinued, I'd be interested to know the timeframe during which it flourished [it seems to have been around in the mid to late nineties - maybe seven or eight years ago].

Thanks!

[Dennis_Knutson]

BridgeVIEW is now called LabVIEW Datalogging and Supervisory Control Module.

[Ben]

Prior to LV 6.0 the industrial Automation form of LV was called BridgeVIEW.

BV 2.1.1 = LV 5.1.1

Back then the underlying functionality to provide the automation connectivity (OPC's etc) required a sperate approach.

As of LV 6.0 the parts of BV that were uniuque to IA were bundled up and renamed as LV-DSC (LabVIEW- Datalogging and Suppervisory Control).

I still have a tower under my desk that has BV 2.1.1. Have not tried to boot it lately...

Ben

Dennis, we have to stop meeting like this!

You win.

Message Edited by Ben on 07-29-2005 12:35 PM

[tarheel_hax0r]

Prior to LV 6.0 the industrial Automation form of LV was called BridgeVIEW. BV 2.1.1 = LV 5.1.1

When was LV 6.0 introduced? Circa 2000? [As I recall, 7.0 was introduced in early 2003.]

So BV would have flourished circa 1995-1999?

On a not altogether unrelated topic, originally "LabVIEW" was intended to mean "Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench", and, to this day, LabVIEW has a huge presence in research laboratories.

But if you look at the presenters at any NI symposium [especially NIWeek - http://www.ni.com/niweek/session_guide.htm], you get the feeling that NI is making a huge push into what I guess you'd call the "Automation" bidness: assembly line automation, HVAC climate control automation, gas and pipeline remote automation, etc.

Lately I've been wondering what percentage of NI's LabVIEW gross revenue is due to plain old fashioned "laboratory" sales, and what percentage is due "automation" sales. My guess would be that the latter is dwarfing the former.

I.e. it seems to me that LabVIEW is almost evolving into something that might be called "AutomationVIEW".

And I'd also guess that most LabVIEW consultants are getting paid for doing "Automation" work - especially since it must be mighty difficult to earn a living in the old-fashioned "laboratory" business, given that there's all those grad students willing to do the work for free.

[Chaos]

BridgeVIEW was introduced September 1996.

LabVIEW 6.0 was June/July 2000

[Jason_S]

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@tarheel_hax0r wrote:

And I'd also guess that most LabVIEW consultants are getting paid for doing "Automation" work - especially since it must be mighty difficult to earn a living in the old-fashioned "laboratory" business, given that there's all those grad students willing to do the work for free.

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We grad students don't work for free. We work for almost nothing 🙂

[LV_Pro]

In my personal experience much (most) of LabVIEW is still being used for automated data acquisition rather than automation control. The projects may be larger than the "hook up a couple of instruments and make a few measurements", may be to make a bunch of measurements on some product and produce a Pass/Fail result but it pretty much is the original idea, scaled up. The NI product that is probably most used for the automation control type of application is Lookout, which really isn't related directly to LabVIEW (maybe by marriage!). Much of automation control is monitoring and controlling  a very large number of points (tags) at a fairly low repeation rates. This, for the most part, is still also being done on proprietary hardware, dedicated to the task, with hardware safety features (watchdog timers, etc.) rather than on Windows based machines. NI is making inroads into this area, both with hardware and LabVIEW running under non-Windows O/S's, but it is a really big industry with some pretty entrenched players. The problem tends to be that many of the customers of this type of solution already have Intellution or Wonderware installations and are reluctant to try something new.  As to grad students being low priced technical staff (indentured servants?) well isn't that why they created the concept of grad students? At least the non-medical ones are allowed to occasionally sleep.

P.M.