Obviously a big part of NI week is getting to see the new releases. Whilst you can get this from the web what I found useful was attending some of the sessions on the new products as many of the R&D teams attend so there aren’t many questions that can go unanswered!

Here are some of the new highlights I saw this year…

LabVIEW 2014

In my previous post I spoke of evolution not revolution. On that theme, the LabVIEW 2014 release was a remarkably understated event at NI Week with few headline new features (though it was great to see the community highlighted again with John Bergmans showing his Labsocket LabVIEW addon in the keynote).

Having had the chance to review the release notes though there are a few that could be of benefit.

• You can now select an input to the case structure and make that the case selector. This productivity gain will definitely build up, even if its only 20 seconds at a time.
• New window icons to show the version and bitness of LabVIEW. A minor update but useful for those of us using multiple versions.
• 64 bit support for Mac and Linux. I think the slow update of 64 bit LabVIEW is almost certainly hampering it’s image as a data processing platform in many fields and this seems like a great commitment to moving it forward.

The others seem like changes you will find as you work in 2014 so let me know in the comments what you like.

What is great is having more stuff rolled up into base packages. I strongly believe there is a software engineering revolution needed in LabVIEW to bring it to the next level so putting these tools into the hands of more users is always good.

LabVIEW Professional now includes Database Connectivity, Desktop Execution Trace Toolkit, Report Generation, Unit Testing and VI Analyzer. LabVIEW FPGA also includes the cloud compile service which gives faster compiles than ever with the latest updates or the compile farm toolkit if you want to keep your data on site.

VI Package Manager

One evening I was lucky enough to attend a happy hour hosted by JKI, who among other achievements, created VI package manager which is by far the easiest way of sharing LabVIEW libraries.

They announced a beta release of VIPM in the browser. This allows you to search, browse and install packages in your browser, promising faster performance than doing the same in the standard application. The bit I think will also be hugely beneficial is bringing in the ability to star your favorite packages. I’m very excited about this as I hope it will make it easier to discover great packages rather than just finding those you are already aware of.

This is live now at vipm.jki.net. Don’t for get to leave any feedback on their ideas exchange, feedback makes moving things like this forward so much easier.

The CompactRIO Revolution Continues!

Two years ago compactRIOs were fun as a developer, not so much if you were new to LabVIEW. They were powerful in the right hands but seriously limited on resources compared to a desktop PC.

A few years ago the Intel i7 version was release which offered huge increases in CPU performance but was big, embedded was a hard word to apply! (That’s not to say it wasn’t appreciated)

Last year the first Linux RT based cRIO was released based on the Xilinx Zync chip, this year it feels like cRIO has made a giant leap forward with the new range.

New performance cRIO. #niweek pic.twitter.com/S67RoISM3r

— Michael (VI Shots) (@vishots) August 6, 2014

When you see some of the specs jump like this you can see why as a cRIO geek I am very excited!

	cRIO-9025 + cRIO-9118 (Top spec of previous rugged generation)	cRIO-9033 (New Top Dog)	Change
CPU	800MHz PowerPC	1.3GHz Dual Core Intel Atom
CPU Usage on Control BMark	64.1%	10.9%
RAM	512MB	2GB	+300%
FPGA Multipliers	64	600	+837%!!
FPGA LUTS	69,120	162,240	+135%

These new controllers are no incremental upgrade, they are a leap forward. My only concern is that it will be easier to make applications fit which is/was a bit of a specialty of mine! The new generation of FPGAs really drives part of this, the same difference is seen on the R-Series and FlexRIO ranges as well.

There is also a removable SD card slot, additional built in I/O and the headline grabber, support for an embedded HMI.

At the session on this we got to see this a bit closer. The good news is that it is using the standard Linux graphic support. This means it should support standard monitors and input devices rather than needing any specialist hardware.

Obviously it is going to have some impact on performance. In the benchmark I linked earlier they suggest you could see a 10% increase in CPU. I’m looking forward to trying this out, you could easily see 50% increase on the old generation just by having graphs on a remote panel so for many applications this seems acceptable.

There is also a KB detailing how to disable the in built GPU. This suggests that there is extra jitter which will become significant at loop rates of >5 kHz, so just keep an eye out for that.

Anyway, that got a little serious, I will be back with a final NI Week highlight later in the week but for now I leave you with the cRIO team: