Switching my experiments from LabView to Python

The What

I’m trying to migrate some of my experimental setup code from LabView to Python. I prefer to use Python and Matlab.

The Why

• High Pricing of National Instruments hardware and software
  • The FPGA setup we use cost us in the high $$$$ just for the hardware, but a suitable FPGA for my use might just cost a few hundred.
  • Expensive software means that the moment you get out of the academic license ecosystem, you’re bleeding money just for the subscriptions
  • NI changed from perpetual licenses to annual subscriptions. So you need a few thousand dollars a year just to keep old hardware running
  • LabView training courses are $$$ a pop. Why would you charge people to learn your platform when your competition is literally free?
• LabView programming (in my opinion) is tedious
  • I don’t want to click 5 times to find a function and then use precise hand gestures to place it at a specific spot on the screen
  • They don’t let you zoom into a vi to see it better. So certain monitor size/resolution combos give you eye strain
  • It has things such as shift registers and local variables which is not intuitive to use for a text-native programmer
  • Programs are quite large and slow to load
• Python is taking over nearly everything
  • Huge amounts of documentation
  • Easy ways to get support across the internet
  • modules, wrappers, libraries to do nearly everything

The How

• Use existing LabView fpga vi’s and interact with them via Python using the NI-supported FPGA module
• Later, learn some FPGA programming and write code to run independently of NI software
• Implement all code in python/FPGA language (Verilog/VHDL)

I will keep posting updates here as things progress

The Progress