DIY Makers, Hobbyists, and Experimenters Get Professional Software. National Instruments has come out with a $49 version of LabView. According to the article, “Called the LabVIEW Home Bundle, this is a fully operational version of the core NI product that can be used to speed up and simplify experimentation by making programming less of a problem.” I’m not having much success with the software bundled with my new digital scope (more on that later, but it’s been very disappointing), and I know LabView is quality software, so I’m seriously thinking about purchasing this package. NOTE: If you’re a student, you can buy a Student Edition of LabView for as little as $20!
Q&A: Digi-Key’s Larson Looks Back—And Ahead. I found this interesting as DigiKey actually started out as a place for hobbyists to get parts. The CEO says, “In the early days, Ron was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, and he was a very active ham radio enthusiast. While he was still in school, he put together a kit [of electronic parts] for sending Morse code, and he would sell these kits at ham radio fairs.” Now, of course, it’s a major electronic components distributor.
Understanding Mixers and Their Parameters. While written for engineers, not radio amateurs, it’s not heavy on the math and just might give you a better understanding of mixers and some of the terminology associated with them.
Elwood Downey says
I used labview on a pretty big project and it was a disaster. I call it a manager’s delight because one can very quickly draw up a small project with little coding and they get a great first impression. So you might like it for your personal work bench. But when it comes to the details that real programmers deal with in instrument control and complex math algorithms it becomes very cumbersome to use. We used it to control the adaptive optics system at a major telescope in Arizona and finally gave up, it just could not handle the complexity. When we recoded all the vi’s in C++ and Qt everything worked much better. So if you want to play with it, fine, just keep in mind that the investment you will make in learning to use labview will not apply elsewhere (it’s a unique architecture) and will not be a stepping stone to more or larger situations.
Dan KB6NU says
Interesting that you had such a bad experience with LabView. I covered the product when I wrote for Test&Measurement World magazine. It has been around for at least 25 years and has many devoted users. I would guess that some of them have developed some pretty complex programs with it.
I don’t expect that I’d be doing anything terribly complex with it. Certainly nothing approaching the complexity of your project. All I want is something that can control a couple of instruments and perhaps munch on the data a little.
Dave, N8SBE says
Labview is like some programming languages (Visual Basic comes to mind) — easy to do something 80% of the way, impossible to do it 100% of the way.
So, if you want to mock up something quickly, OK. But, if you want to ‘seal it off’ and make it useful to uninitiated users, it gets pretty hairy. We use it a lot to automate overnight tests in our electrical labs, but you could never use it for production code. It’s just not meant for that.
Dan KB6NU says
If by “production code,” you mean code that will run in a product, you’re right. I’m sure National Instruments would argue with you, though, if you meant code running in a production test system.