Hobbyist Toolkit
Raspberry Pi Display options??
Solved!
The embedded version of the LabVIEW runtime that is installed on a Raspberry Pi (and Beaglebone Black and most of NI's realtime targets with the exception of a few high end Intel x86 systems) does not support displaying the frontpanel on a local display. There is no magic ini file setting to enable this, as the functionality to display a front panel is simply not present. The only way such a target supports a front panel display is during debugging, with the front panel executing on your development machine and communicating with the VI on the target over the network.
@electroblake wrote:
Hi, thank you for the clear answer to the question of displaying the front panel for a VI deployed to a Raspberry Pi on the Pi's display.
It's been a few years since your post. I'm wondering if there have been any further developments, or if anyone knows if there is a roadmap for enabling the Pi to display the front panel in a future update. This feature would really unlock a lot of functionality!
Thank you very much,
Blake
It's still the same. Changing that would require a significant effort to develop a specific Raspberry Pi personality of LabVIEW rather than repurposing the LabVIEW Realtime for NI Linux setup for ARM based real-time targets. Considering that the potential earnings of such an endeavor for NI are about 0.0 $, chances for such a development are equally 0.0%.
@electroblake wrote:
That's an interesting point of view. From my perspective, it is much easier to deploy Raspberry Pi based systems than it is to deploy Windows machines, and they don't require as much maintenance. I think there would be a lot more interest in using LabVIEW if this were possible.
And that's were the rub kind of lays. For much of NI's existence, LabVIEW never was a product to earn money with. It was an enabling technology to sell NI hardware. NI hardware is high performance and accordingly expensive but NI mastered the art of integration at a time where its competition still was assembling PC boards that were build with discrete logic. The result was that NI hardware performed better than the competition and was sold with a markup to the competition because of that, while it cost a fraction to manufacturer. The marketing cost of their hardware was a substantially bigger part of the cost than the actual manufacturing cost and there still was a nice earning left over on each single board. Every dollar spent in LabVIEW development returned several dollars of pure profit in hardware sales.
Earning money with software is very hard and that's still true even after going to subscriptions to prop up income and then reintroducing perpetual license at a double cost price point of what it used to be. Investing money in a LabVIEW version that runs on hardware that NI would earn zero bucks in hardware sales is simply not a very attractive option, even if the original LabVIEW as a hardware sale accelerator is not as true anymore as it used to be.
