Vision Builder AI - The easy choice for MOST applications.
February 04, 2019
Vision Builder AI - The easy choice for MOST applications.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with National Instruments Vision Builder AI
My company does engineering consulting for testing and automation of production and lab environments. One of our specialties is machine vision, which is the use of cameras, lighting, and image processing to provide information about a process, whether that be inspection, sorting, or some type of guidance to another system. Machine vision development is a mixture of science and art so there is a lot of "try it and see what the result is" to the development combined with experience. The process is very iterative, which is where Vision Builder AI really shines. It's a standalone program that can run on PCs and NI's Smart Cameras that makes development and deployment extremely fast. There's no real programming involved in it so I can recruit help from my coworkers who are not traditional programmers to help out. It is our go-to software for machine vision software development and deployment.
- The interface is extremely easy to use. This makes development very fast, which is key to us. It also makes adjustments on the deployed system easy.
- The deployment is easy because the code you write and test with can be converted to a deployed solution (with UI) in the click of button.
- It is agnostic to the hardware. You can use any machine vision camera on any PC.
- There's a state machine interface for architecting complex applications without having to do the process of converting from a state chart/flow diagram to code.
- Vision Builder AI is for serial processes, which means there really isn't any parallel processing happening. This works great for a production line where things are coming down in a row but isn't suited for applications where the processing needs to branch and happen in parallel with another process.
- There is code generation built-in if you want to go from Vision Builder AI to LabVIEW but it's got so many wrappers around it that many times I find it faster and easier to just write it all from scratch in LabVIEW (if you want to go that route) rather than doing the code generation.
- If I create a pattern matching template in LabVIEW or the stand-alone template editor I can't seem to use that in Vision Builder AI because it doesn't give me the option to load one from file. I have to create the template in Vision Builder AI.
- Since machine vision development is such an iterative process, the ease of use of the software cuts down development time significantly.
- Many times we don't have to create a custom solution for the machine vision application. We can just use and deploy Vision Builder AI out of the box.
- The simplified software development provided by Vision Builder AI means we can spend more of our time on the mechanical side.
- National Instruments LabVIEW
It all comes down to tradeoffs. Do you want something that is extremely flexible and full-featured or do you want something that is easy and fast to use? Sure there are things that you can't do in Vision Builder AI that you can implement in LabVIEW, however, the vast majority of the applications that we work on do not need that extra functionality so Vision Builder AI is the best choice for us. If we find out along the way that Vision Builder AI is not going to work for us at least we have all of the steps and parameters figured out that we can use when moving to LabVIEW.