Alternative to NI / Labview

It would be helpful to know your analog and discreet I/O count along with your requirements for accuracy, resolution and speed. There are a lot of data acquisition options out there, all have different stregnths and liabilities. You might consider some inexpensive PLC's or recorders or dataloggers. I can not make any specific suggestions without more information about your application.

I've looked, and finally bought the Real Thing from NI. Their followup service and their massive applications databases are worth the cost alone.

If you're handy with C or C++, you can write routines using the subroutines supplied with most commercial data acquisition products. I've done that, too, but of course it's more difficult to make most changes.

Dangerous Bill

The Schneider Zelio PLC family is a low cost, low end offering with a surprising amount of features e.g. front panel display, TCP/IP and Modbus comms, analog and digital IO, FBD (Function Block Digram) programming with ZelioSoft to name a few. You get an industrial quality product from a major manufacturer.

Check Daytronics

http://www.daytronic.com

TGB

http://www.dasylab.com/ has been around for a good while.

www.strawberrytree.com used to make a graphical programming software, but seem out on this business.

A few years ago I did a large project on HP VEE. It is a graphical programming language similar to NI. It worked very well and used IO devices from various manufacturers.

I am now using Matlab and Simulink but the price is higher. I must admit that I am impressed by the power of the modeling and the advanced calculation features. the $30K price tag is high (real time controls) but worth it in my case.

Be more specific as to what sort of test automation you are doing.

You may want to investigate Weeder Technologies. Probably not suitable for complex or sophisticated projects, but certainly viable for some. I'm not affiliated with the company, but used one of their modules for a data acquisition project in our research group.

Strawberry Tree used to offer WorkBench for Windows, an easy to use program for data acquisition and control. We now only do consulting in electronic design, software, and data acquisition as Voler Systems div of Strawberry Tree Inc. WorkBench for Windows was a branded version of DASYLab, which is still available through www.measurementcomputing.com (owned by National Instruments). It is less expensive than LabVIEW and is easy for nonprogrammers. It supports a wide variety of hardware, not just from National. Recently version 11 was released.

Walt Maclay

Thanks everybody for their input.

I am too busy at the moment and haven't had the time to reply and look into this further.

I guess I am so busy because I don't have a good test automation system...

Talking about test automation, TestStand from NI is a great tool but, again, NI is too expensive and they are not very serious about backward compatibility. Seems that you need to buy a whole new product from them every few years...

Thanks for your replies.