Why LabVIEW?

Well, before the „why”, its worth talking about what is LabVIEW* at all? In a nutshell LabVIEW is a graphical programming language being developed by US based National Instruments (NI for short) since the mid eighties specifically for industrial applications.

Where do we use it?

Its unique way of programming (more about that in another post), steep learning curve and tight integration of NI’s hardware products made it quickly popular in education, engineering and R&D activities. In the beginning LabVIEW was almost exclusively focusing on measurements, automation and industrial communication and while it’s still a domain specific language by today it has become a mature development environment offering a wide variety of tools to realize non-industrial desktop applications as well.

Just to state the obvious, while the weights were shifted, LabVIEW is still super strong in measurement automation and process control.

LabVIEW and Omega Byte Ltd.

So now as you have a grasp of what LabVIEW is we can talk about the why. At some degree it’s already answered: the primary reason we use LabVIEW here at Omega Byte is that it’s just the right tool for writing industrial applications. Another reason for using it is that LabVIEW has become a quasi standard in certain parts of the industry and R&D so by using it we can offer compliance, standardization, long term maintainability and support to our customers. At Omega Byte we have 35+ years of experience with this language combined. We have people at the beginning of their journey (doing LabVIEW development for couple years) and some black belt LabVIEW veterans with 10+ or even 15+ years experience.

Not enough?

Well, there is one more reason: as mentioned above LabVIEW is graphical (not text based like 99% of the programming languages) and using it is actually quite fun. It has a great community, a responding community so its also easy to pick for someone just starting programming. I hope this gave you a bit of an insight into LabVIEW, feel free to contact us with any questions or comments.

* LabVIEW is the acronym of „Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench” but I bet 99% percent of the developers don’t know this (I had to google it as well)