NI Releases Free Editions of Flagship Software: LabVIEW

AUSTIN, Texas – April 28, 2020 – NI (Nasdaq: NATI), the provider of a software-defined platform that helps accelerate the development and performance of automated test and automated measurement systems, today announced the release of the LabVIEW Community Edition and LabVIEW NXG Community Edition for use on personal projects.

Free for most non-commercial uses, the LabVIEW Community editions offer the same features as the professional version of the popular systems engineering software. They include an updated version of the LINX toolkit to help engineering hobbyists interface and/or deploy LabVIEW applications to popular maker computing targets like Arduino, Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoards.

“We are thrilled to encourage the power and potential of our LabVIEW community members who are involved in home and hobby projects,” said Jeff Kodosky, co-founder of NI and inventor of LabVIEW. “We created the LabVIEW Community editions so engineers could use the software for free — to pursue their personal ventures, experiment with programming ideas and create and share IP with their peers.”

The LabVIEW Community editions also replace LabVIEW for Secondary Schools and provide an engaging way for students in grades K–12 to learn more about science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The LabVIEW NXG Community Edition also includes the LabVIEW NXG Web Module to help users with little to no web development skills create web applications. By utilizing the software’s graphical programming language, they can create applications in LabVIEW that run entirely in a web browser without the need for additional software. A SystemLink™ Cloud evaluation is also provided for hosting and sharing web applications.

“LabVIEW Community Edition and LabVIEW NXG Community Edition put the software’s  intuitive graphical language in front of a growing number of makers and engineers,” said Chris Cilino, founder and president of GCentral.org and consultant at Composed Systems. “I am excited to see how these editions will empower developers to unleash their initiative and ingenuity and collaborate in new ways.”

Over the past few months, users of the beta version of LabVIEW Community have demonstrated new ways to apply the software, including with a crowd-source controlled robot, a tablet user interface for a robotic arm and a digital twin of an actual device used for simulated testing. 

Now widely used across many sectors, NI first released LabVIEW over 30 years ago to provide engineers working on applications requiring test, measurement and control with hardware integration and data insights. Over the years as industries have evolved, the software has been enhanced to meet customer needs and market demands and today includes:

• An intuitive graphical programing language
• Extensive libraries of IP
• Wide-ranging hardware connectivity
• A large developer community

To learn more about and download the LabVIEW Community editions, visit ni.com/labviewcommunity.