This page is about how to modify and build the LQ source code, not about using LQ in your own projects. For the latter, see the setup guides for Windows and NI Linux RT instead.

Most of the code in the main GitHub repo is auto-generated and should not be edited by hand. See the code generator repo instead.

Also, do not call VIs directly from the main Git repository. These VIs have “Separate compiled code from source file” enabled, which causes significant lag when opening or closing large LQ-based projects. Instead, only use the VIs that you have installed. Alternative, run the build scripts to generate usable VIs (see the Building from Source section below).

System Requirements

To build the C++ shared library (runtime):

  • MSVC 2015 or newer (Windows), GCC 5.3.1 or newer (Linux)
  • Qt 5.12 or newer
  • Qwt 6.2.0 or newer

To build the NIPM packages (dev and runtime):

To build the .ipk packages (runtime):

  • Python 3.5 or newer
  • opkg-utils 0.4.0 or newer

Building from Source

To build the LQ packages from scratch:

  1. Install a suitable C++ compiler
  2. Install Qt
  3. Build and install Qwt
  4. Install NI LabVIEW
  5. (If using LabVIEW 2014-2017) Install the additional National Instruments tools listed under the System Requirements section above.
  6. Clone the repo from https://github.com/JKSH/LQ-Bindings/.
  7. Open buildpkg-nipkg-runtime.bat and buildpkg-nipkg-dev.bat with a text editor. Check the file paths at the top of each file and and edit them if necessary.
  8. Open the Command Prompt and ensure that your compiler is in the PATH (e.g. by launching x86 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019)
  9. From the Command Prompt, run the *.bat files.

The steps are mostly the same for the Linux packages – just use buildpkg-ipk-runtime.sh instead of buildpkg-nipkg-runtime.bat)