Graphical programming for test and measurement
National Instruments' LabView has received the 2007 Test of Time Award.
Rick Nelson, Chief Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 3/1/2007 2:00:00 AM
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| 2007 AWARDS: Test Engineer of the Year Test Product of the Year Test of Time Overview of Awards Program READ OTHER MARCH ARTICLES: Contents, March 2007 |
In 1986, graphical programming burst upon the test-and-measurement scene with the introduction of National Instruments’ LabView. Created by NI cofounder Jeff Kodosky (who now serves as NI business and technology fellow), LabView helps engineers and scientists in diverse industries quickly produce the code necessary to run a wide range of applications.
In the 20 years since its debut, the LabView graphical programming platform has revolutionized the development of scalable test, measurement, and control applications. In recognition of LabView’s longevity, ease of use, market penetration, and ever-increasing sophistication, Test & Measurement World’s editors have chosen to honor it with the 2007 Test of Time award, which recognizes a product that continues to provide state-of-the-art performance for at least five years after its introduction.
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The 20th anniversary edition of LabView, introduced in 2006, offers extensive features and works with many hardware platforms, yet it maintains the intuitive, easy-to-use data-flow graphical environment of LabView 1. Courtesy of National Instruments. |
Offering an intuitive graphical development similar to flowcharting, LabView challenged traditional text-based approaches to programming, enabling programmers to “wire” together virtual instruments on their computers just as they would wire actual instruments in the lab. The original LabView version ran on Macintosh computers, and the August 2006 introduction of the latest, 20th anniversary version—Labview 8.20—was accompanied by a LabView 1 demonstration on a dusted-off ’80s-era Mac.
Since the 1986 debut, LabView has been ported to Sun and Windows platforms (those versions appeared in 1992), and you can find versions that work with personal digital assistants, field-programmable gate arrays, and embedded digital signal processors. And LabView is not all work and no play—National Instruments worked with Lego to develop the LabView-programmable Lego Mindstorms NXT robots.
Commenting on the Test of Time award, Dr. James Truchard, National Instruments’ president, CEO, and cofounder, said, “Just over 20 years ago, we set out on a quest to do for test and measurement what the spreadsheet had done for financial analysis. The result was LabView—a graphical programming environment that has stood the test of time for test-and-measurement applications and gone on to become a graphical system design tool for designing and prototyping complex systems for deployment in industrial applications.”
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LabView 1 brought graphical data-flow programming for test-and-measurement applications to the Macintosh computer in 1986. Courtesy of National Instruments. |
During the introduction of the 20th anniversary edition, which occurred during NIWeek 2006 in Austin, Dr. Truchard explained his vision for LabView 8.20: It combines text-based math, supports various models of computation, and makes it easy to build embedded applications, all in the support of a three-pronged attack addressing design, prototyping, and deployment. LabView 8.20’s capabilities are based on the underlying hardware capabilities, he said, adding, “New high-bandwidth buses, such as PCI Express, are giving virtual instrumentation and desktop computers the power to process enormous amounts of complex IF and RF data in communications applications. With LabView 8.20, engineers can intuitively develop design models and measurement applications through a graphical-programming notation that naturally represents the data flow of communications systems.”
LabView 8.20 includes an object-oriented programming environment, a DLL import wizard, an FPGA wizard, a Web services wizard, a LabView instrument-driver export wizard, and a math-script capability that allows existing scripts to be easily used within LabView programs. In addition, a new modulation toolkit provides a software-defined approach to communications system design and test.
As for future versions, Truchard said that programming languages typically have life spans of about 50 years, so LabView users can expect to see another 30 years of innovation.
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