National Instruments LabVIEW vs. Tacton Design Automation

LabView is a great tool to connect your sensors to your data aquisition hardware. It makes it really easy to set-up a data acquisition routine that meets your individual requirements. I, as an engine researcher, find it very well suited for engine experimentation. For any other programming needs, i.e. not data acquisition, I would not recommend using LabView because of its graphical programming architecture. The architecture makes it a great tool for Data Aquisition but puts at a disadvantage when it comes to other computational tasks, e.g. making a thermodynamic engine model. For those applications having text-based programming is better suited

Incentivized

For design automation for SOLIDWORKS, I feel Tacton Design Automation is the best solution out there. It's simple to develop and implement for the design/engineering department. But can be implemented within the sales team as well with Tacton CPQ. When a company has products that are modular and/or have many sizing updates, this is where Tacton excels. If you have products that are completely customized, then Tacton or even design automation isn't the best suited for that.

Incentivized

• Automation.
• I/O.
• Data Processing.

Incentivized

• Tacton has a non-linear solver, meaning it can solve lots of equations without them being is a particular order. This enables the software to be incredibly flexible.
• Tacton has a great interface to set up configurators for people to use. No knowledge of programming languages is required. The configurator uses equations similar to Excel equations to control what the users options are.
• Tacton has the ability to easily add lists of data like product lists, beam or pipe sizes that because available for user selections or for calculations.
• The Tacton configurator also automatically builds the user interface as you set up user inputs making it much easier to set up then competitor software.

Incentivized

• Sometimes backwards compatibility issues arise.
• Error messages can be confusing.
• Although it is a graphical programming interface, it has a pretty steep learning curve at first.

Incentivized

• Layout mode is probably the most lacking aspect of the software (within Tacon Design Automation Engineer). Something so powerful as having modular parts should be more heavily supported. Although, I've heard Tacton is focusing on updating this with better functionality.
• The constraint editor does not display complex/lengthy constraints very well. I end up using Excel to visually break out in cells the different aspects of the constraint.

Incentivized

We chose LabVIEW over MATLAB due to the integration with hardware and the graphical programming interface. Also, the ability to use LabVIEW with FPGAs and real-time processors without having to make large changes to the code base or swapping to a separate programming environment was a big benefit since we don't know what hardware will be suitable for each customer application.

Incentivized

Drive Works is the main competitor for the TactonWorks module of Tacton. We actually discovered DriveWorks and purchased it before we discovered Tacton and started to use it. Once we discovered Tacton we liked it so much better we dropped using DriveWorks and switched to Tacton. I think you could accomplish what you need to in DriveWorks, but it is easier to setup in Tacton and Tacton has alot of features that really can make your product configurators nice

Incentivized

• Allows us to spend more time on analysis and less time on coding

• Time to produce submittals went from 1-2 weeks down to a couple of days. Then, once approved, normally to produce the fabrication drawings (70+ unique parts) it would take from 4-6 weeks. We can get it down to as little as a few days.

Incentivized