Hobbyist Toolkit
LINX isn't dead but it appears to be very very sick, doesn't it?.
Solved!
First, if you call out names you should actually mention Andy L before me. He definitely has been more active on here with helpful responses than me. 😁
It's indeed sick and the naming change doesn't help. It's officially not the Linx Toolkit anymore but the Hobbyist Toolkit. The versioning chaos didn't help either when NI took it over to integrate it as part of the Community Version. There is some NI activity on the github repository https://github.com/LVMakerHub/LINX but it is fairly limited. Nevertheless there are some efforts from NI to keep it actually alive, it's just that the people involved very likely do this after official working hours and not as their official job description. 😁
The Hobbyist Toolkit is a large piece of software for a LabVIEW Open Source project and it has been created by someone who originally worked at NI in some sort of practical stage project before he moved over to Digilent, which then took stewardship of it as part of the LabVIEW Makerhub project. With Digilent being a fully owned subsidiary of NI it wasn't a complete change of ownership but Digilent also was limited in what they could do as it was not the meaning that they were going to compete with NI in hardware and software in any way. It mostly stayed a fun pet project until NI decided to release the LabVIEW 2020 Community Edition and to integrate the Linx (they only renamed it later to Hobbyist) Toolkit as a sort of extra incentive. It could have been a killer feature if NI would have been more clear for themselves what they really want to do with the Community Edition.
A few enthusiasts within NI were saying "Yes we want people to getting to use LabVIEW!"
But the large corporate structure was fearing that it would cannibalize sales and were limiting any effort to invest into the Community Edition to make it really successful.
The big vision about that LabVIEW only can be successful if you get young people on their way to being engineers to actually get their hands on it and use it for fun projects, was years before lost, when NI corporate decided to go for new and bold frontiers and that LabVIEW and petty DAQ hardware was just peanuts and an expensive burden on the path to more and greater share holder value.
Is the Hobbyist Toolkit dieing? Well, maybe! It is an Open Source project after all and as such anybody could take more initiative to try to improve it themselves. So far the efforts on that front have been very limited. I tried but got distracted and the fact that nobody else seems to want to tackle that front did definitely not help to encourage me. The architecture of the Linx Toolkit is quite large but in several ways also limited by what a casual LabVIEW programmer would usually come up with. It definitely could use a big refactoring even if that means that it would be likely not anymore fully backwards compatible.
An extra difficulty of course is that with pretty much every new RPi model there were new difficulties that made the Toolkit break or at least degrade in functionality without some serious effort. Same about new Raspberry Pi OS releases that often change how certain things need to be done.
Is it dead? It's Open Source so it is partly a question you can pose to yourself too!!
