Release Date for LabView Toolkit?

[larryc]

Hi All,

I am sure this is on many people's mind and at the risk of sounding inpatient, I hope someone will bring us some estimates on the release date for the Labview NXT toolkit.  : )  Let me also say that the users are eager to see this kit released precisely because of the power and potentials that it promises.  Of course, this is only possible with the hard work done at NI.

Larry

[JvdV]

LabVIEW 7.1 and 8.20 customers can download the beta version of the toolkit from ni.com beginning this fall.

There is now exact date...

John

[larryc]

Thank you John!  I must have missed the Fall part of the announcement.

Larry

[JvdV]

On ni.com I found a webpage were you can submit your e-mail adres for news about the Lego Toolkit.
http://zone.ni.com/devzone/conceptd.nsf/webmain/3C96B483A39B5F96862571BF000C8127

Good luck with it.

[williamlweaver]

Hi Folks,

I received another tease about the availability of the LabVIEW NXT toolkit from

NI News - Academic Edition

Is this an indication of imminent availability or just buzz?

-Bill =]

[williamlweaver]

Hi Folks,

The following is NOT a flame.  Please read it as the reasoned comment that it is.

I use LabVIEW exclusively throughout our four-year BS degree program.  Our program seeks to supply the growing need for specialists in Laboratory Informatics and LabVIEW is an excellent solution for our projects concerning data acquisition, analysis and industrial control. 

When I learned of the August 2006 release of the Mindstorms NXT system, I felt it would be an excellent tool to teach Machine Intelligence and Automation this fall semester.  Working with LEGO robots goes a long way to capturing students’ interest.  It’s difficult to keep yet another programmable logic controller sexy for more than about five minutes.

We have had success using the NXT-G environment shipped with the NXT system, but quickly stalled when attempting to use it for moderately-intensive calculations.  The students have spent the past two semesters learning to use LabVIEW and having to switch to another language is not feasible.

I was encouraged to learn of the Fantom SDK available with LabVIEW vi’s for communicating with the fantom.dll, but the lack of documentation has left us resorting to trial and error while trying to create our own version of the missing NXT toolkit for LabVIEW.

While searching for examples in other application languages to use as a guide, I was surprised to learn of the available alternatives to NXT-G mentioned on Wikipedia.  Microsoft Robotics Studio, Robot C, Next Byte Codes, BricX Control Center, Transterpreter, Lisp and Perl have growing communities of LEGO enthusiasts --- all leveraging the initial buzz surrounding the release of this awesome product.

I am dismayed that LabVIEW is not mentioned as an alternative programming environment to NXT-G.  With only a few short weeks remaining in the fall semester, there is not time remaining to play with the Fantom SDK.  I’m going to receive a bunch of ill will from the students, but we must bail on the Mindstorms NXT project in order to cover the algorithms promised in the syllabus for the course.

As a LabVIEW enthusiast, I hope the unavailability of the NXT toolkit does not become a missed opportunity to introduce LabVIEW to a wider audience of users outside the laboratory automation community.  Perhaps the toolkit will be ready for use when we run the course again next year.

Best regards,

-Bill

[John Field]

Hi Bill (and everyone else),

The initial concept for the toolkit was to remove the MINDSTORMS skin and expose the LabVIEW functionality that the MINDSTORMS development team used. However, we got such a good response after the NI Week announcement that we decided to clean up the experience more than we originally planned. We've been fixing more of the bugs, adding better installers, writing more documentation and developing examples.

Right now, we are working hard to release it as soon as possible. In R&D, we will start running our last round of acceptance tests later this week. If things continue to go well, we will approve it for release after a few weeks. Then, the web team handles actually posting it to the website. Things are looking good, but I can't make promises on a release date.

If you haven't done so already, I'd recommend that you go to the product page for the toolkit (http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/4435) and click 'Submit your info to stay posted'.

Thanks for your patience. I can promise that it will be rewarded with a better toolkit.

John Field
MINDSTORMS Software Group Manager
LabVIEW R&D

Message Edited by John Field on 10-31-2006 01:38 PM

[williamlweaver]

Hi John,

Thanks for your thoughtful (and encouraging!) reply.  I'm sure things are fast and furious on the inside, but I just wanted to relate the palpable hum of excitement here on the outside.

I've only been teaching at the college level for 7 years, but I haven't seen the likes of this buzz surrounding the NXT before.  I'm not sure what nexus of video games / robotics / artificial intelligence / science fiction / Popular science we've stepped in, but the NXT appears have struck a strong chord.  I'm a dyed-in-the-blue LabVIEW enthusiast and I don't want to see LabVIEW miss the party.

-Bill  =]

-ps With thanks to Kjeld Petersen, James B. and some helpful folks at NXTasy.org, I've recently been able to get USB and BlueTooth communication between LabVIEW 8.0 and the motors and the sensors (including the I2C Sonar...what a chore) to function.  It's the functionality we were missing to continue our project.  I'm looking forward to the release of the toolkit.  Thanks!   

[tol]

Hello!

Any news?

Best regards

Miki

[UlfM]

It's out! http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/4435 brought me to something I downloaded right now- and yes, it seems to be the toolkit! Yippie!

Thank you, NI!

Regards

Ulf