What If He Was Right? A Texas-Born Revolution for LabVIEW, AI, and Robotics

A playful provocation: if the original vision of graphical dataflow was right all along, what happens when we revive it for AI and robotics—universal, efficient, frugal—and let it run on every SoC on Earth?

The Cover That Dares You to Compare

Two photos, one question: what if he was right? On the left, the pioneers who turned diagrams into running systems. On the right, two French engineers who keep asking themselves a mischievous question before every design decision: “What would Jeff do in our place?” He’s our imaginary mentor now—a North Star we never met, yet consult every day.

Admiration, not nostalgia. The goal isn’t to imitate a past success. It’s to extend a lineage—visual dataflow as a living, industrial language for the next century.

If We’re Right, Here’s the World You Get

– A modernized LabVIEW as universal cockpit — AI + logic + hardware, authored visually, executed natively.
– ONNX as the single source of truth — one graph that travels from workstation to Jetson, Zynq, Pi, or IPC.
– ONNX Runtime as the conductor — kernel fusion, tight memory plans, predictable timing.
– GO & GO HW orchestration — If/Loop/Scan for behavior, plus GPIO/ADC/PWM/DMA nodes to sense–decide–act.
– Frugality measured — joules per decision as a first-class metric; edge inference that saves watts and budget.
– From monitoring to piloting — a cockpit that doesn’t just blink; it drives robots, lines, test benches… and maybe rovers.

Texas over the Valley

The next quiet revolution doesn’t have to come from the Valley. It can rise from Austin, where visual dataflow first met industry. If the sleeping giant awakens, NI can become the most consequential engineering platform company of the 21st century—not by chasing apps, but by standardizing how the real world meets AI.

And the spark? Two stubborn French engineers at Graiphic who keep wiring graphs, measuring energy, and refusing to give up on the simplest idea of all: make complexity legible.

SoC Reality, Not Hype

A System-on-Chip is a small city—CPU for logic, GPU/NPU for arrays, DMA and caches for movement, GPIO/ADC/DAC/PWM/timers for touch. Our bet is simple: run the graph where the signals are born. Less copying, less latency, fewer watts. It’s economics you can measure, not just slogans.

The Three-Ingredient Recipe

1. One file: an ONNX graph that captures computation, control flow, and hardware I/O.
   2. One engine: ONNX Runtime compiles, fuses, allocates, and schedules across Execution Providers.
   3. One cockpit: the LabVIEW experience—live, visual, debuggable—reborn for AI and robotics.

   Library vs runtime in one line: libraries are instruments; the runtime is the orchestra. We bring the score.

Why This Is More Than Style

– Solution: a single, inspectable artifact replaces glue code and mystery scripts.
– Gain: stable latency, higher throughput, fewer copies, fewer bugs.
– Economy: lower capex (reuse the graph), lower opex (edge execution + energy awareness).
– Safety & trust: auditable manifests, deterministic loops, explicit watchdogs and safe states.

The “What If” Checklist

What if every LabVIEW diagram could export/import a clean ONNX graph?
What if training loops, metrics, and pre/post were in the graph—not hidden in Python?
What if hardware was first-class—GPIO, ADC/DAC, DMA—standardized across vendors?
What if energy per decision was a contract, not a footnote?

Answer: You’d get the best engineering tool on Earth—across domains.

Our Pledge to the Founders We Admire

We admire the original trio—deeply. Our provocation is a tribute: keep the spirit, push the scope. If we see clearly, we’ll help awaken a larger truth inside the platform they started. And if we’re wrong, we will still have shipped a cleaner, more honest way to build systems.

Call to Engineers

If the idea resonates—Texas over the Valley, graphs over scripts, frugality over bravado—come build with us. Bring your boards, your constraints, your energy meters. Let’s wire the world, one graph at a time.

Collaborative Closing

At Graiphic, we call this sovereignty through sobriety: AI that runs where you need it, when you need it, with the exact energy it requires — no more, no less.

But ideas alone don’t spark revolutions. People do. Graiphic needs you! 🚀

We’re building the next wave of AI and LabVIEW innovation — a movement that could awaken NI’s true potential and prove that Texas, not Silicon Valley, is where the 21st century’s great engineering revolution begins. And you can be part of it:

• 💡 Share our vision — visibility is leverage.

• 🤝 Collaborate — R&D, industrial use cases, LabVIEW modernization.

• 💶 Fund & invest — we’re looking for partners to scale the spark into a fire.

• 🔗 Partner with us — embed our orchestration into your solutions.

• 🧪 Test & feedback — help us refine by trying our tools in the field.

• 🛠 Contribute — much of our ecosystem is open source (MIT).

• 🗣 Spread the word — every network connection expands the revolution.

Because what if he was right? And what if we are, too?