Labview 2020 Community Edition - Does it support Legacy Hardware?

[TheScepticEngineer]

Hello all,

I am new here. Last time I used LabVIEW was over 20 years ago, when its version 5.3 was all the rage. With the news of the free Community Edition, I thought I'd dabble back in it. As I have not been in the loop for a very long while, I was wondering if this new free Community Edition Beta would support some old-school DAQ PCI cards? What version of DAQmx does it work with, if at all? Is there a list of compatible hardware?

I have a still very powerful PC with a PCI slot and I was thinking of using LabVIEW to connect such an old card—which can be found quite cheaply online—to an STM32 Nucleo board to emulate certain comms or digital I/O or some such, for my own entertainment at home.

I have not installed LabVIEW 2020 Community Edition Beta just yet, I thought I'd ad ask the question first, in case someone knows off the top of their head 🙂

Thank you very much!

[crossrulz]

Disclaimer: I am not an NI employee and everything I am about to say is my logic on the matter.

LabVIEW 2020 Community is full-blown LabVIEW Pro, just with a non-commercial license.  So the only version of drivers that will be compatible (upon release) will be the 20.0 drivers (DAQmx 20.0, NI-VISA 20.0, etc).  So if DAQmx 20.0 still supports your DAQ board, then you are good to go.  There should be a compatibility list with the driver readme.txt file (DAQmx 19.6 readme).

[TheScepticEngineer]

@crosslutz,

Thank you for that. I was thinking of old E Series and M Series cards. I checked and DAQmx up until 19.0 supports both, but from the next version onwards—i.e.19.1—only the M Series cards are supported. It also seems that the cards whose support is dropped are mentioned separately, such is the case for those dropped from version 17.6 (https://www.ni.com/en/support/documentation/compatibility/17/devices-and-modules-no-longer-supported...). Based on this, I assume that the M Series cards will be fine for Labview Comunity Edition, but not the E Series, as I assume DAQmx 19.0 will not work with this new Labview, in spite of there's not being an explicit statement as such. Am I vaguely correct?

[crossrulz · Accepted solution]

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@TheScepticEngineer wrote:

Am I vaguely correct?

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That is my thoughts on the matter exactly.

[rolfk]

DAQmx 19.0 will NOT install into LabVIEW 2020, only into LabVIEW2019 down to 2016. Each DAQmx installer supports the according LabVIEW version and 3 versions prior to that. Unless you trick the DAQmx installer in not finding older LabVIEW installations (by for instance renaming the installation folder for those versions temporarely) it will even remove any already installed DAQmx support from those older versions. While this trick can let you maintain old installations with DAQmx support library installed, this is a totally unsupported configuration that may crash, eat your harddisk or fry your favorite pet, if you try to execute LabVIEW programs in those older versions that execute DAQmx functionality. I only use it to be able to load old programs without broken arrow in order to check the diagram but not to execute and test software in those old versions. In theory it "should" work as the DAQmx API usually doesn't make changes that break backwards compatibility.

An entire different story is forward compatibility. A LabVIEW appliciation programmed and compiled with DAQmx x has a definite change of breaking at runtime if you run it on a computer with DAQmx x-1 or older installed. So you are in a bit of a bind here. In order to install DAQmx into LabVIEW 2020 you need to install version 20.0 or newer (up to 23.x will work once we get there), but only 2019 or older might support some of your boards which is not only an unsupported combination but with a serious chance for trouble.

[TheScepticEngineer]

Thanks for that, very useful information, given that I was away from NI for such a long time.

An acquaintance of mine told me that he has a LabVIEW RIO Evaluation Kit from his student days, which he would be willing to loan to me, and which seems to be based around a Single-Board CompactRIO sbRIO-9636. Upon further investigation I found out the following:

- This is a RT board, so it would need LabVIEW RT, is that included in the Community Edition?

- It also has FPGA onboard, so LabVIEW FPGA will also be needed, is that also included in the Community Edition?

- the support in various versions of DAQmx is patchy for single-board CompactRIO, if I need it at all?

I noticed in the software support for the board (https://www.ni.com/en/support/documentation/compatibility/09/software-support-for-compactrio--compac...) that it seems to be supported by the most current version of both LabVIEW RT and LabVIEW FPGA, but I do not know if they form part of the Community Edition.

Thanks a lot to this very active community, a refreshing experience. And apologies for the noob questions.

[crossrulz]

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@TheScepticEngineer wrote:

- This is a RT board, so it would need LabVIEW RT, is that included in the Community Edition?

- It also has FPGA onboard, so LabVIEW FPGA will also be needed, is that also included in the Community Edition?

As far as I am aware, no.  I know there were at least talks about toolkits, I think it was decided to not include toolkits that were not part of LabVIEW Professional.

[rolfk · Accepted solution]

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@TheScepticEngineer wrote:

- This is a RT board, so it would need LabVIEW RT, is that included in the Community Edition?

- It also has FPGA onboard, so LabVIEW FPGA will also be needed, is that also included in the Community Edition?

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Well, as crossrulz has mentioned, LabVIEW RT and LabVIEW FPGA is not part of the Community Edition. It's fairly understandable as the hardware targets this is running on are anything but hobby hardware and it is unlikely that you want to automate your home with a $5000 system or more.

But, the Community Edition is supposed to contain (if it doesn't already in the Beta) an updated and NI maintained version of the Linx Toolkit which allows to target LabVIEW to single board computers of the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black family. This while not truely real-time enabled like the RIO targets from NI, works very much like one of the RIOs where you develop your code on your computer and deploy it to the respective target board to be executed there. Linx also supports Arduino but not as target to deploy LabVIEW code on. Rather you develop an application in your favorite Arduino IDE and deploy it to the board and then Linx comes with communincation libraries to talk to that app from LabVIEW over serial or TCP/IP.

Of course for specifc DAQ programming Linx isn't the same as DAQmx. You typically have to communicate with the specific DAQ hardware through I2C or similar interfaces and have to program that on this level yourself (or find community projects that implement a library of functions for a specific hardware already). DAQmx is a much higher level API with both easy of use and high performance advanced functionality at the same time. Doing data acquisition on a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black with the Linx interface functionality is not the same out of box experience for sure, but there is no DAQmx for these targets.

[TheScepticEngineer]

rolfk, you could not have made it any clearer if you tried 🙂 Many thanks for all your support!

[pazarci]

I am not an experienced labview user, but I have taken advantage of the community edition, installed daqmx 15.5.1 without a problem and I am using my 12 year old ni-usb 6009 usb daq module without a problem. I was hesitant at the beginning because it was not clear whether it would work, so I made an image backup of my system drive in case it does not work and I need to go back. I am using win10 pro 20h02 edition on an Asus n752vx notebook.