Friday, January 19, 2007

Labview

I have been programming a bit in LabView for the past few weeks and man what a stinker!

Here are a few pointers to new programmers in LabView.

First: The if condition is called case in LabView, you put up a case and give it a boolean input, this makes it so that any output of the case (that is any wires going out of the case) have to have output from both conditions, not like if statements in conventional programming, major headache!

Second: Trying to gather up elements into an array by using while/for loops, major headache for the first time but then you get the gist of how this programming language works and understand the loops then you can make them work ok, not great but ok (that is far from satisfactory).

Third: A graphical interface! What on earth are people thinking! This is the worst interface ever, all the wires get bungled up and it is really hard to keep track of what is what. To make a simple loop you need lots of space on the screen because the icons are so big.

There is more but I am at home now and dont remember what else there was. But the bottom line is this, dont use it for anything else but communicating with peripherals, dont do any data handling with it, its a pain in the ass! I am sure you can do it efficiantly (there must be a reason why all these engineers like this application so much) but getting to that stage is pretty tough if you want to self educate yourself. Go rather with python, much simpler and more powerfull.

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