💆🏽 🏐 👩🏿‍🤝‍👩🏼 National Instruments Launches Free LabVIEW 2020 and NXG 5.0 Community Edition 🤼 😑 📯

Hello colleagues!

At the end of April, an event happened that fans of code drawing were waiting for: the National Instruments company finally released a free edition of its graphic programming system - LabVIEW Community Edition .

The name echoes the Visual Studio Community, but unlike the Studio, the LabVIEW development environment is absolutely free only for non-commercial projects and for teaching in schools (for Academic Universities, an Academic Site License is required).

Well, now everyone can join the fascinating world of graphic programming, download LabVIEW and play with it for as long as there is enough desire (and patience).

NI is generally moving in the right direction in promoting LabVIEW (as much as it can be right in a specific area like graphical programming). Until now, there was simply no legal way to use it after the trial period, but to buy - since the professional version costs more than six thousand, and if with several toolkits, then the cost easily translates into a five-digit amount and by no means rubles. Even a simple basic version costs four hundred a year and is clearly not intended for a hobby. And the product itself is very curious - I am happy to follow the comments and see that opinions are polar - from outright rejection to love, but few people leave this thing completely indifferent.

LabVIEW 2020 and LabVIEW NXG 5.0

First you need to give a little explanation to avoid confusion, because at the moment we have two editions of LabVIEW available to us. The first is called LabVIEW 2020. This is a continuation of the "classic" LabVIEW line, which dates back to October 1986. In fact, this is the twentieth version (starting from the ninth version, the numbering coincides with the year). Basically in the "production" it is used. This line has a somewhat “hello from the nineties” interface, but over twenty reincarnations this classic line has gained a huge number of libraries and toolkits.
The second version available for download is LabVIEW NXG 5.0. “NXG” means “NeXt Generation” - the next generation. This line originates from 2017 and in the long run is likely to replace the "classic" line. Currently, the elements of the classic LabVIEW from version to version are more and more being transferred to NXG ( LabVIEW NXG RoadMap ), but it still remains “catching up” in many ways, although with some NI equipment, the NXG environment significantly simplifies setup and configuration. In general, it is quite a difficult task to release a new generation of tools while constantly expanding the previous generation.

The fundamental difference between these two lines lies also in the tools used for development. If the bulk of LabVIEW 2020 is written in pluses, then NXG is .net. Hence the certain “slowdown” of the NXG at the start and start of work, although the fifth version subjectively became a little “faster."

Another difference between the "classic" LabVIEW and LabVIEW NXG is that LabVIEW is generally cross-platform - there are versions not only for Windows, but also for Mac OS (10.13 or 10.14) and Linux (officially for openSUSE Leap 42.3 / 15.0, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7/8 and CentOS 7/8), but NXG is only for Windows (well, that's understandable - it uses WPF for the interface).

However, the free LabVIEW Community Edition is offered only for Windows, and LabVIEW 2020 Community Edition is exclusively in the 32-bit version (and the NXG Community Edition is only 64-bit, because the 32-bit NXG does not exist in nature). It's strange not to see Community Edition for Linux.

I would recommend downloading and installing both editions (links at the end of the article). At some point, you may need to register on the NI website (in any case, it makes sense to do so in order to be able to chat on the forum, especially since it is completely free and without SMS). During the installation process, you will be prompted to disable Windows fast startup - you do not need to do this unless you have NI equipment that cannot correctly initialize when the quick start option is enabled (which is enabled by default).

Both versions - both 2020 and NXG - perfectly "get along" on the same computer and do not interfere with each other. A rather large number of examples have been accumulated for the “classic” LabVIEW, and there are things that are not available in NXG (well, here are 2D and 3D Picture Control, for example).

However, for teaching graphic programming “from scratch” I would advise not “classics”, but NXG - there is a slightly more modern and pleasant interface, and ideologically they are very similar. Also, the new version has everything in order with Unicode, well, on high-resolution monitors it looks much better, but in general, the code sketch for the Block Diagram looks similar, something like this in the good old LabVIEW 2020:

And so in modern NXG:

In addition, NXG has some nice interactive tutorials on the basics - basic types, arrays, clusters, loops, etc .:

For specific questions, I can safely recommend a couple of forums: the official one on the NI website (in English) and Russian-speaking LabVIEW Portal. Both there and there they are happy to help beginners, and I can answer some basic questions in the comments.

National Instruments Launches Free LabVIEW 2020 and NXG 5.0 Community Edition

LabVIEW 2020 and LabVIEW NXG 5.0

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