Random Ramblings on LabVIEW Design
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joerg.hampel
on:
Ramifications
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swatts
on:
There should be NO barrier to using LabVIEW in Academia!
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swatts
on:
Thinking As a Service (TaaS) is not a good model!
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DavidJCrawford
on:
The Case for an NI Linux Distribution
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Dhakkan
on:
Tech Growth is Done! (Click-bait alert)
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swatts
on:
LabVIEW in a Box! 2 - I made a PCB
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swatts
on:
A Lil bit of History ..
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Petru_Tarabuta
on:
Some Boring Statements
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softball
on:
LabVIEW and Linux Review
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swatts
on:
LabVIEW in a Box!
Re: There should be NO barrier to using LabVIEW in Academia!
What-ho My Lovelies,
I have been writing, just not here...
But what trouble have I been making I hear no-one ask... Well I will tell you..
I have been focusing my efforts on creating low-cost drivers using Derricks wonderful RP Pico firmware. I'm now at a stage where they can be used.
But why put all this effort in??
Well, I have been mulling the very question, I knew in my heart that there was a benefit to this work, putting that into a sensible sentence is a little bit more difficult.
The start of the journey was a meeting I had with NI at the start of the NI finding themselves again. In it a very senior (in job, not age) NI person exclaimed "There should be NO barrier to using LabVIEW in Academia!". She was right, very very right... So that then led me to think about what barriers there were.
NI have done a good job on licensing Community Edition, but are very focussed on their incumbent educational hardware offerings and that brings a problem. A problem I call ...
The LabVIEW Hardware Price Gap
Students do not have the budget for expensive hardware in their engineering projects so they reach for cheap microcontroller hardware to solve their engineering problems, LabVIEW is not well represented in this area. To program this hardware students tend to use C and Python.
This was only my theory based on one observation at Southampton University. When I presented this to CSLUG an attendee confirmed his experience and I paraphrase...
“at my University the hardware budget was £80 per student per project…. There was an Arduino course and a LabVIEW course, LabVIEW was not used for any projects...”
How CTI Fixes this....
LabVIEW Community Edition and Linux
If you follow me in any way you will be aware that I'm very enthused about Linux and LabVIEW and have been investigating lots of cheap Single Board Computers. Most noticeably the Raxda X4 with a custom Grove board of my own design.
RP Pico VISA Firmware
Derrick Bommarito has provided us with some lovely firmware that allows us to talk to a Pico through VISA. Every time you see him you should buy him a drink or an ice-cream!
A Pico with a Grove shield offers 6 Digital GPIOS, 3 Analog GPIOs, 2 I2C connectors, 2 UARTs and 1 SPI. The I2C functionality allows all sorts of hardware to be controlled. The price of this is less the $10.
Community Hardware Drivers
Derrick Bommarito has also gifted us a load of drivers and a template for driver design that really maximises the usefulness of the lil Pico. I have been busy adding hardware drivers to this repository.
https://github.com/LabVIEWCommunityTraining/cti-drivers-lv-visa
CTI Website
Olivier Jourdan has made the creation of material wonderfully easy, and I have been creating material!
Currently the automatically produced PDF is over 55 pages... I have lots more drivers to make, come join me, it's fun!
And what of the future.. I want to make driver packs for Academia and Robotics.. I want to do a similar set of documents for John Medland's OpenCV driver set.
We have a Discord server here
I'm planning on being in Fort Worth for NI Connect and manning the community stand and doing a bit of Academia speaking with Casey Lamers. If I can get them in I will have demos..
Hope to see you there.
