Tag Archive for ‘Mac’ at VI Shots

Apple.com/science has a feature page dedicated to LabVIEW! Not sure when this went up but it’s awesome. The main article focuses on the RoMeLa team who worked on DARwIn. VI Shots did a video last year on DARwIn. The article goes in depth on the power of LabVIEW but also focuses (of course) on the teams decision to switch from PCs to Macs:

“We started developing DARwIn in Windows,” says graduate student Sean Egger. “But you can port LabVIEW code from PCs to Macs and vice versa. Many of us had Macs and prefer Mac OS X to Windows, so we ported most of our DARwIn development software to the Mac version of LabVIEW. The Macs give us a stable operating system, and more importantly, a UNIX core, which makes things easier – such as TCP connections and serial port communication.”

“One of the reasons we really like LabVIEW is that it will connect so easily and seamlessly to any kind of sensor or motor controller. We don’t get bogged down writing drivers. LabVIEW’s got packages that communicate with just about anything we’ve thrown at it.”

Quicktime Version

National Instruments had a very small booth at Macworld Expo this year. They were there nonetheless and I asked them a few questions about the current state of LabVIEW on the Mac. I also wanted to find out how, and if, a current Windows user like myself could use a Mac exclusively and still manage to satisfy Windows based LabVIEW project clients. According to Mike Neil, LabVIEW product manager, you can have your cake, er… Mac and eat it too. With the use of virtual machines (vmware fusion, parallels) or bootcamp (which boots the whole machine into Windows), you can now run your windows development environment on a Mac and satisfy any Windows project requirements. Which leaves me asking myself, why am I still on a PC?

Are you working with LabVIEW on the Mac? Tell us about your experiences in the comments.