LabVIEW Interface for Arduino Discussions
Programming Arduino - and then untethering it from LabVIEW
LIFA and the C Generator Toolkit are two entirely different AND incompatible beasts. While LIFA is a firmware component for the Arduino that allows using the Arduino like an intelligent device over the (virtual) serial port from within LabVIEW, the C Generator Toolkit allows creatinbg C code routines that can then be compiled by the compiler toolchain of your target into an executable (and with some research and sweat probably also into an Arduine sketch). But that requires fairly intimate knowledge of the target compiler toolchain. Just knowing how to type .configure, make on the command line is definitely not enough.
The issue with this is that just creating C code is by far not enough to get a similar seemless integration of your dream target into your LabVIEW environment as most other things in LabVIEW work. You simply get a bunch of C routines that make use of various library functions that you have to adapt from the template code to your specific target. And for every variation in target hardware, OS version and type, etc you likely have to dig through those library functions and make according changes. Also the price of the C Generator Addon is even for professional LabVIEW users rather high, and definitely not an option at all for home projects.
Then you have to add an extensive IO module library (not sure what their name is now) to integrate the various peripherals into your LabVIEW environment to be able to use them and last but not least dig into the LabVIEW project handling to integrate the entire C toolchain into LabVIEW so that you get a new target type to create from within a LabVIEW project.
While the issues in the last alinea are only necessary if you want seemless integration in LabVIEW and can be omitted if you don't mind to launch the C toolchain from the command line instead each time, the rest is still a very extensive work with a very steep learning curve that in fact nobody outside NI has yet demonstrated to make a usable thing. There have been several attempts by rather experienced people but most got stuck in some kind of prelease version that still needs much more time to get really right than it ever could make commercially so the work seems to have stalled after the initial enthusiasme. And it would need to be redone in part for every of the different Arduino boards.
Of course everybody hopes that NI would create such a Toolkit for the target of their choice but the problem here is that everybody wants his own target supported with preferably his own peripherals. And with targets like Arduino that cost around $30 you get another problem, namely everybody expects that toolkit to be in the same price range than the hardware and of course that should include the LabVIEW license too! But I'm not sure how NI could justify to sell a Toolkit which can do much more than the standard Base version of LabVIEW for a fraction of its cost. So if NI created such a Toolkit it would be likely an addon in the same price range as existing addons and therefore wouldn't sell and be a commercial flop, like all the other embedded toolkits for non NI-targets have been if you consider the development and most importantly support cost in relation to the sales. However lowering the price is also no option as it would cannibalize the existing LabVIEW sales.
I also understand that some actually feel that this approach would be the ideal way to force NI to lower the overal costs of LabVIEW, but hey most successful companies I know about don't slaughter their own revenues but rather protect them. I know about economical theories where lowering the price will create more sales but with a product like LabVIEW more sold products means more support demand, which is a substantial part of the costs of LabVIEW, so a lot if not all of that sales would be eaten up by the additional support costs and revenues would in fact go down. Also don't forget that NI is in fact a hardware company and makes a lot of revenue with hardware which LabVIEW is an enabling tool for. Nothing of all this applies for 3rd party targets, so you end up with more sales and support costs for LabVIEW and less sales of hardware and even less revenue.
Or we end up with support offerings as are quite normal nowadays in software industry, where the overal credo is: Baaaa, the product is sold, you are on your own!
