Labview, Teststand and LabWindows/CVI - Does one need all three?

[dre99gsx]

I've been developing in LabVIEW since the heyday of LabVIEW 5.0.  Recently, some colleagues were mentioning how great Teststand is.  To my surprise, they had very little LabVIEW experience.  Matter of fact, they were clueless on how to develop a Labview executable.  The same discussion happened with regards to LabWindows.  I understand all three of these products serve different purposes, and are interchangeable to some degree.

My question is:  If you can design and build mostly anything in LabVIEW, why would you need TestStand?  Is it marketed more towards folks who need simplification and ease of use?  Couldn't you accomplish the same results with LabVIEW, adding even more flexibility than TestStand offers?

And, those who've used LabWindows, why not use Visual Studio instead?  It is merely preference more than anything?  The one positive I see with LabWindows is instant easy access to all NI hardware and drivers, with the bonus of script-based programming.  Otherwise, you can do everything in VS that can be done in LW.

If you are capable of integrating C code in LabVIEW, yet have the ability to develop complex software in LabVIEW, why not just go the route of LabVIEW from the start, and have full control over every aspect of your program?  Is it the learning curve?

You would think that a Teststand user could easily jump over to LabVIEW (let's say he were to change career paths), but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Or, hoping not to start a flame war, is NI just diversifying their product portfolio to increase market share and profits? 

[Dennis_Knutson]

TestStand is not a programming language. It is a test executive that allows you to create scripts that will execute code modules written in a wide variety of languages. It comes with built in features for report generation and database logging. Those in itself are big time savers. It has the built in ability to execute scripts in parallel and that is also a big time saver. You can certainly do all of this in LabVIEW/LabWindows/Visual Studio alone but do you have the time to create all of the functionality. I've been using LabVIEW a lot longer than you but when I was faced with the prospect of creating many dozens of scripts for products with tight deadlines, the choice of using TestStand was easy. I eventually ended up creating custom step types so that the test engineers only needed to know TestStand basics and did not need to experts in other programming languages. They could concentrate on the product and the test equipment.

[JKSH]

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@dre99gsx wrote:

I understand all three of these products serve different purposes, and are interchangeable to some degree.

...

You would think that a Teststand user could easily jump over to LabVIEW (let's say he were to change career paths), but that doesn't seem to be the case.

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LabVIEW and LabWindows serve similar (-ish) purposes -- they are general-purpose programming languages with good integration with NI and other industry hardware drivers. They are targetted at 2 different kinds of people though.

TestStand serves a completely different purpose -- it is for test management.

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@dre99gsx wrote:

Couldn't you accomplish the same results with LabVIEW, adding even more flexibility than TestStand offers? 

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You could. But like Dennis said, this flexibility costs a lot of development time. 

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@dre99gsx wrote:

The one positive I see with LabWindows is instant easy access to all NI hardware and drivers

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That is a very important bonus, no? The libraries that come with Visual Studio alone can't do that.

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dre99gsx wrote:

If you are capable of integrating C code in LabVIEW, yet have the ability to develop complex software in LabVIEW, why not just go the route of LabVIEW from the start, and have full control over every aspect of your program?  Is it the learning curve? 

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The thing is, if you want "full control", you would write your software in C++ or C. These can be much more flexible than LabVIEW, but as before, flexibility costs development time -- that's why people choose C over Assembly, and why they choose LabVIEW over C.

Keep in mind that no tool -- not even LabVIEW -- is suitable for all tasks. Get to know different kinds of tools, and choose the best tool for the task at hand. As they say, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 😉

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@dre99gsx wrote:

Or, hoping not to start a flame war, is NI just diversifying their product portfolio to increase market share and profits?  

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LabVIEW, LabWindows and TestStand are not the extent of NI's software product portfolio.

There's also LabVIEW for LEGO MINDSTORMS (which adds an attractive wrapper on top of LabVIEW), SignalExpress (a combination of heavily-simplified LabVIEW and MAX), DIAdem (for data processing and analysis), VeriStand (TestStand on steroids), Multsim (electronics design toolkit)...

The list goes on. Each product serves a different purpose and a different market.

[crossrulz]

As has already been said, they all serve a different purpose.

What I typically do with my test systems is I will create a driver library in LabVIEW.  These are the VIs that I use for instrument communications, File I/O, etc.  I then use TestStand to create sequences that use that VI library I build.  I managed to get 6 people who had little to no experience with LabVIEW writing very functional TestStand sequences just by calling those VIs that I wrote.  Major time saver.  Debugging is also a little easier in TestStand.  So LabVIEW is my general purpose programming language and TestStand is then my test executive.

NI has a wide variety of software products.  Their goal is to have something for every part of the development process.  Multisim for initial design.  DIAdem for post processing lots of data.  LabVIEW for design and prototyping.  Signal Express for quick prototype testing.  VeriStand for testing models and actual products as a hardware in the loop.  TestStand for testing products.

[Norbert_B]

LabWindows/CVI indeed is one product, which is very "dubious" if you are not familiar with it. Why pay for a C-based development environment if i get all the tools for free as well (e.g. notepad and GNU compiler)?

Simple reason:

The IDE provides you with some valuable tools and the advantage to swap compilers easily. So you can use the same environment to develop code for different targets (e.g. microcontrollers). Also, as mentioned, the integration of NI hardware world is part of the product, so it is a natural choice for C-based developers using NI hardware.

All in all, all three mentioned tools are... yes: Tools. So they give you advantage if you know how to use it. If not....well, "a fool with a tool is still a fool" is a quite famous quote 😄

Regarding TS: Sure you can implement a sequencer on your own. But are you willing to put way more than 10 "man years" of development effort into it? I ask because that is exactly what NI did with TS....way more than 10 years of development with a team of multiple developers.

Norbert

[Thoric]

If you're interested in creating simple test management solutions in LabVIEW, there's a toolkit for LabVIEW called PTP Sequencer on the Tools Network that provides you with simple sequencing functionality in native LabVIEW. And it's free. It's not TestStand by any means, but can give you a headstart in the creation of your own simple testing solutions in LabVIEW.

[dre99gsx]

Thanks for the responses, puts things in perspective!