If you’ve been paying attention to our friends at LabVIEW MakerHub, you may have noticed an announcement made April 1st… LINX 3.0 has been released!
If you haven’t followed LabVIEW MakerHub, LINX is a set of LabVIEW VI’s that allows LabVIEW to connect to non-NI hardware platforms, such as the Nest Thermostat, Kinect One, Leap Motion Controller, Arduino, chipKIT, and a few more. This software enables us to use LabVIEW to control the physical world. We were exceptionally excited about the previous version of LINX and created the LabVIEW Physical Computing Kit, a bundle that included LabVIEW Home + our favorite chipKIT microcontroller board (WF32). Users could program LabVIEW and then connect to the WF32 through a USB Cable and use a LabVIEW Front Panel to control the WF32.
LINX 2.0, required the “target” (the platform that was being connected to LabVIEW) to be tethered. This meant that at all times your Arduino or chipKIT had to be connected to the computer via a USB cable. Although for most applications this is completely okay…there are many for which you need to be cut free.
Which is what LINX 3.0 enables!
With LINX 3.0, two new platforms are now supported, the Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone Black! With these two platforms + the ability to deploy, rather than just connect, your LabVIEW code can now be untethered. This is largely because in the past, LINX needed to have a host computer to run the LabVIEW VI’s…and many microcontroller boards don’t have the resources to keep up.
To make sure we support this new feature in LINX, Digilent is adding two new kits for the Physical Computing bundles.
NEW AND EXISTING OPTIONS:
New: The Raspberry Pi is a brilliant platform for computing-type projects, or for users that want to make a cheap or portable computer. This includes things like image processing, spreadsheets and data processing. It lacks substantial I/O (like PWM and analog reads/writes), so it may require a microcontroller board to off-load those low-level I/O activities. It can be coupled with boards like Arduino or a chipKIT.
New: The BeagleBone Black has close to same processing abilities of the Raspberry Pi and also the low-level I/O intergration. It’s basically what would happen if you mated a Rasperry Pi with an Arduino, high-end processing for an embedded Linux OS and PWM, analog read/write, and power for breadboarded projects.
Existing- Tethered: The WF32, although a tethered option, is still a strong board for learning general electronics and ideal for prototyping electronics. It has an on-board Wifi module + double the I/O of an Arduino board and is largely compatible with many of the Arduino projects out on the internet.
Existing-Tethered: The SparkFun RedBoard (or an Arduino) is an excellent starting point for someone who is very new to electronics. It’s essentially a more efficient (less knobs, wheels and buttons to be distracted by), simple microcontroller board that allows users to get started fast.
For $89.00 you can choose which bundle is best for your LabVIEW projects, using our table below!
Product |
Best for… |
Needs to be Tethered? |
Price USD |
| LabVIEW Home Bundle : Software Only | Learning how to use LabVIEW! | N/A | $49.00 |
| Physical Computing Kit- RedBoard/Sparkfun Inventor’s Kit | Good for the very elementary beginner, comes with amazing Tutorials and can be bought at Sparkfun.com
Includes LabVIEW Home |
Yes | $149.00 |
| Physical Computing Kit- WF32 | Good for someone who is looking for a more advanced set of projects or needs high current and WiFi. This is an ideal board for handling motors and a lot of analog I/O.
Includes LabVIEW Home |
Yes | $89.00 |
| Physical Computing Kit- Beagle Bone Black | This combines a lot of the functions found on both the WF32 and the Rapsberry Pi and brings a lot of I/O to an embedded Linux machine. Great for robotics and high end projects needing a lot of horsepower.
Includes LabVIEW Home |
No | $89.00 |
| Physical Computing Kit- Raspberry Pi | Ideal for a user who wants to replace where a laptop would be in a project, which a much smaller and lower power version.
Includes LabVIEW Home |
No | $89.00 |
| NI myRIO | This is a fully supported by NI, LabVIEW super-target that can pretty much do anything listed above.
Includes LabVIEW Home |
No | Contact NI |
We are extremely excited to have more LabVIEW targets in our catalog, but even more excited for the sorts of projects that will now be coming out of the LabVIEW MakerHub Community!
So head over to the store and check out the new products!
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