If ever you find yourself at a vision system developers convention you may discover that the terms “National Instruments” and “LabVIEW” elicit some passionate responses. The vision world seems divided in to two camps: those who love the graphical programming environment, and those who swear it can’t be real programming unless it’s text-based. It’s an interesting phenomenon because I don’t believe any other software package has the power to generate such strong feelings. When did you last see two guys almost come to blows over Halcon, for example?
Now at this point I have to confess to a lack of impartiality. I am a LabVIEW user, and I like it. I like the ease of use, I like all the prepackaged routines (vi’s, in the jargon,) and I like the debug tools. But why, oh why, does National Instruments have to make it so complicated to use LabVIEW for machine vision work?
Let me explain: there are just too many packages, options, add-ons and acronyms. There’s the Developer Suite and the Professional Development System, the Vision Development Module and the Vision Assistant, IMAQ, Vision Builder and so on. Even my local sales rep was confused when I asked him for advice.
But here’s some good news! It appears NI are trying to simplify this with a page on their website that makes it easier to figure out what you need. Thank you, NI, this helps a lot. Now, could you just do something about the pricing?
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We also use Labview extensively here and I must admit that I sometiems go back and forth between the love/hate camps. FOr the PC, the vision tools from NI are world class (why does NI try to keep them a secret?). However, when our jobs call for a smart camera, we've always turned to the dreaded Cognex spreadsheet. I'm happy to say that our next project will use the NI smart camera. NI should have released this product 5 years ago! What the heck took you so long, NI?
mike
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