Videos of the Web LabVIEW UI Builder and LabVIEW System Designer

During NI-Week I posted about two of the projects I’ve involved with, the Web LabVIEW UI Builder and the LabVIEW System Designer. The video’s of both of the preview demo’s were posted and you can view them now.

• Video of Web LabVIEW UI Builder
• Video of LabVIEW System Designer

If you are interested in getting early access to either of these two projects, to provide feedback as a customer on the usability and features please visit this page to inquire about becoming a lead user (ni.com/day2).

Preview of the Web LabVIEW UI Builder

During this morning’s NI-Week keynote we previewed a new LabVIEW tool to create thin client UIs. By preview, it isn’t avaialble for you to use today. If you make use of web services to share data from LabVIEW applications on Windows or Real-Time (RT) targets (PXI or cRIO) you will be able to make use of the Web LabVIEW UI Builder to create zero install thin client UIs to monitor and update the data with web services. The editor will be accessible through a browser and doesn’t require you to install something on your machine, well except for the Siliverlight plug-in. The editor and your final application are Silverlight applications.

The image below shows you the UI created using the Web LabVIEW UI Builder that was shown today during the keynote as well as editor hosted in a browser.

Screenshot of Web LabVIEW UI Builder from NI-Week 2009 Keynote

The Web LabVIEW UI Builder has the LabVIEW graphical programming paradigm but there are some differences with how you use LabVIEW today. These exist to provide true thin client editing and execution and of course to also for us to try some new things out in a supporting tool without changing your daily existing experience with LabVIEW. I’ll write more on these in blog posts after NI-Week and ask you to chime in on your impressions.

The best way to really get involved in the feedback process is apply for the Web LabVIEW UI Builder pioneer program. If you’re interested please let us know since we’re actively selecting people to join the pioneer program. As part of the pioneer program you’ll get early access to the software when it’s ready and interact with the product manager, program manager and engineers to help shape the product’s features.

Preview of the LabVIEW System Designer and System Diagram

This morning during the NI-Week keynote we previewed the LabVIEW System Designer. The LabVIEW System Designer introduces a System Diagram that lets you graphically design systems that integrate I/O, communication between devices and targets and multi-rate signal processing algorithms.

In communications signal processing, especially on FPGAs, many algorithms are multi-rate and must function in a streaming manner. There are three areas the LabVIEW System Designer focuses on:

1. Multi-rate DSP algorithms on an FPGA targets
2. Communication between multiple computing targets, including Windows hosts, Real-Time Processors and FPGAs
3. Graphical configuration, management and visualization of hardware and I/O resources

Below is a diagram of an HDTV receiver and the image of the System Diagram created with the LabVIEW System Designer from this mornings Keynote. You can see a number of targets, communication of data between them as well as the VIs performing demodulation as well as MPEG decoding.

HDTV Receiver Diagram

LabVIEW System Designer Implementation

I’ll write more on each of the focus areas of the LabVIEW System Designer once NI-Week is over, if a specific area is of more or less interest please let me know so I can focus my future posts better. You can see a video of what we showed last year, I’ll post a link to this years video once it’s ready.

If you think you’d benefit from these features please let us know, we’re actively selecting people to join the pioneer program. As part of the pioneer program you’ll get early access to the software when it’s ready and interact with the product manager, program manager and engineers to help shape the product’s features. This is a critical phase where user feedback can help refocus our efforts in a broad sense or refine some key usability issues.

They’re here … new LabVIEW features

It’s on the web-site even if it isn’t “official”. LabVIEW 2009 is coming to a computer near you. Features include code sharing with VI Snippets, saving even more time with partial diagram clean-up and the updated icon editor and some power features like VI recursion and and partitioning for loops across cores. Enjoy the new version and let us know what you think about it.

Also, you may notice the name of the new release is the year of the release, LabVIEW “2009″. Does that mean you should expect another one next year at this same time? I’d wager you should.