Labview and National Insturments

[ScottyH 0]

I have been happily working with Industrial automation for about 20 years. PLCs - Allen Bradley, GE, and Mitsubishi. Robots - Staubli, Fanuc, Motoman. Motion controllers and CNC. I like my work and have had some very interesting projects in my past. My latest employer is a big fan of National Instruments and LabView. Until I started I have never heard of them. I have my opinion that they are not really made for industrial automation but may be good at measurments in a LAB enviroment. Everything I try and do with the hardware I run into limitations. Like an output card that only has 16mAmps. 2 questions. Does any one here in this formum cross over to NI? Opinions? Where do they lie in the Industrial automation world?

[Peter Nachtwey 15]

I think your opinion is right on. We use LabView for our automated test rigs that test all our boards. LabView works well for that but it I can't see it being used in controls.

[Chris Elston 79]

Since 2009, FIRST Robotics has used a cRIO Compact real time target. Even though I mentor control theory on my robotics team, I still haven't grasped the concept of how Labview works and flows. I struggle with it because I am a PLC minded person and it's hard for me to wrap my head around how the software works. But what is amazing to me is my robotics team is comprised of high school kids. They installed the free software from National Instruments each year, and we are required to use the cRIO every year since 2009. They can sit down after I explain control theory to them for a day or so and start writing code in Labview exactly as I say. The speed from proto-type to real competition ready robot code is now 4-8 days as compared to the old way of 15-21 days. Though I have never used the cRIO in a full blown automation machine, I just can't see Labview working that way. It looks like a mess to program with no good house keeping structure. It can be wired all over the place and if you try and do good house keeping you end up with a bunch of VIs that are hard to find or get too. You can view our robot source code here: http://www.frcsoft.com/forums/index.php?autocom=downloads&showcat=29 We have 2009 and 2010 up for download. 2011 will be up soon. I need a PLC to Labview course or something. I find it frustrating to learn and program because I am an old dog and can't release my mind set from PLC logic and flow to grasp the concept of Labview is my struggle. Hence why the high school kid can pick it right up because their minds are fresh and not clouded like mine.

[Joe E. 259]

I've never used Labview myself, though many of my classmates did as part of their intro to engineering class (we used Matlab). We do have a fair amount of Labview stuff running, though. Some are just HMI and SCADA type applications. Others manage our machine vision and gauging systems (PLC gives them a "go" trigger and waits for a "good" or "bad" signal). At a previous employer (they manufactured BLDC motors and amplifiers), I worked with LabWindows CVI from the same folks as LabView (NI). It uses a lot of the same drivers, but you write code in C. I didn't have too much trouble getting sequential stuff to happen.

[gleblanc 1]

I've been working with LabView from NI since about version 7 in 2003. It's a wonderful system for instrumentation, and it does have the capability to do some automation, but it's not designed for the typical industrial automation tasks like machine control, line control, batch processing, part counting, etc. We used it extensively to test printed circuit boards, integrated circuits, and semiconductor wafers part way through processing. It was easier to do the measurements we needed in LabView than it would have been in a PLC. I've only ever run it on Windows. It runs great for maybe a couple of days or couple of weeks at a time, but I certainly wouldn't want to trust a 24-7 operation built on as many lines of code as it takes to get LabView installed (you need a full-blown OS to run it). HTH, Greg