Any Digilent FPGA Board supported by Labview?

[HKPhysicist]

Hello Friends,

Is there any cheap Digilent FPGA Board supported by Labview?

I am new to Labview. I find it a very interesting programming IDE.

I have tried Labview on my chipKit WF32 board and they can work together well.

Now, I want to try Digilent's cheap FPGA board.  I am not sure whether Digilent's cheap boards can be programmed by Labview Community + FPGA.

My purpose is to experience programming FPGA board.  My activity is not commercial.  So, please do not recommend multi-thousand dollars hardware and software to me.

Thanks for your opinions.

[GerdW · Accepted solution]

Hi HK,

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@HKPhysicist wrote:

Is there any cheap Digilent FPGA Board supported by Labview?

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AFAIK the answer is NO!

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@HKPhysicist wrote:

I am not sure whether Digilent's cheap boards can be programmed by Labview Community + FPGA.

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FPGA is generally not supported by LabVIEW 2020 CE edition!

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@HKPhysicist wrote:

My purpose is to experience programming FPGA board.  My activity is not commercial.  So, please do not recommend multi-thousand dollars hardware and software to me.

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When you want to use LabVIEW and its FPGA compiler tools then you need to use hardware supported by NI: this mainly includes cRIO/FlexRIO devices.

When you want to use "cheap" Digilent boards then you need to use the software that comes with those "cheap" boards…

[HKPhysicist]

Gerd,

Thanks for your clear explanation.

[rolfk]

Please Gerd, don't use the abbreviation for the Community Edition. It has nothing to do with Conformité Européenne nor the Windows embeded fiasko called Windows CE.

[HKPhysicist]

rolfk,

Can I say "I want to eat apple"?

[rolfk]

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@HKPhysicist wrote:

rolfk,

Can I say "I want to eat apple"?

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No problem with that. 😀 Of course if you write "I want to eat Apple" someone in Cupertino might feel pissed at, 😁 and syntactically it would need to be "I want to eat an apple".

But as a teacher in highschool thougth us about using "I want" in a sentence:

Don't say "I want ...." that is utterly useless. Either you do things or you let them be, but wanting something is simply stupid. If you tell your gf "I want to kiss you" she will leave you behind, bored to death, or scream at you: "Don't keep talking about it but do it!"

[RTSLVU]

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When you want to use LabVIEW and its FPGA compiler tools then you need to use hardware supported by NI: this mainly includes cRIO/FlexRIO devices.

When you want to use "cheap" Digilent boards then you need to use the software that comes with those "cheap" boards…

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I find this very surprising considering who owns them : 

[rolfk]

It's not that surprising really. The Xilinx toolchain isn't exactly a cheap thing and while you can get some of the tools in a home aka. starter-version directly from Xilinx or as part of some developer boards, that's not the deal NI gets from them. In addition the development of the LabVIEW FPGA interface is a pretty extensive investment that they won't get reimbursed from the sale of some low cost FPGA hardware.

The problem here is that NI is a commercial entity, who has shareholders that want to see some return of investment. Not in 20 years from now by some potential school kids that learned LabVIEW but at latest at the end of this fiscal year. That might be bad in terms of long term planning, but that is how modern capitalisme works and demands accountability. The return of investments created in even 5 years from now are not interesting to the big investers that work with strategies that deal with millisecond reaction times on the stock market.

[Terry_ALE]

Development of LabVIEW FPGA was first started somewhere in 1997.  First release in 2003.  It is 2020.  I think that is quite the investment.  And I am certain that in the late 90s they may have thought it crazy to make LabVIEW FPGA.

There are open source FPGA tools and boards that you can buy for next to nothing.  You could start there.  LabVIEW FPGA has eval period as well.

I am really happy that they came out with Community Edition.  I wish they did this a long time ago.  I wonder if adding FPGA/RT to community edition may come soon enough.  After all without NI hardware you can't do much with LabVIEW FPGA or RT.  Now they have IP Export which should definitely not be free and opens you up to non-NI hardware.

[rolfk]

Not contending anything you say. My comment was specifically about adding LabVIEW FPGA to the Community Edition and allow to use Digilent and other low cost hardware with it.

Also when LabVIEW was developed NI was not a publicly traded stock market company. The only people owning shares of it were all in the board of directors and upper management. Since then much has changed also in the way business is conducted and the way stock market expectations determine what a company should or should not do. Long term investments definitely isn’t verY high on that list. 

As to the free Open Source tools: Go use them please and invest time into improving them. Way to many people point at them as a legitimation to demand open sourcing everything but wouldn’t invest even one hour of their own time to help improve them.