About LabVIEW

LabVIEW, the superb software development environment from National Instruments, is now vast in its functionality and scope of application. It was designed for engineers and scientists to enable them to perform with a computer the following tasks:

Reading or Writing of Digital or Analogue Voltages.  Often a system can be controlled or data can be acquired from it using analogue or digital (TTL) voltage signals.  Examples of this are almost endless, but include motor control, measurement of physical parameters such as temperature and pressure, image acquisition, switching of relays etc etc.  National Instruments manufacture an enormous range of data acquisition cards and other data acquisition and signal conditioning hardware, and these integrate easily with LabVIEW.  Sometimes the acquired data can be manipulated (e.g. using LabVIEW PID routines) and then used to send out control signals.

Communication with Electronic Instruments.  Using communication protocols such a serial, GPIB, USB, CAN and modbus, LabVIEW can communicate with almost any instrument (for control or data acquisition purposes).  Routines can be written from scratch to achieve this, but there are also now hundreds of instrument drivers, written in LabVIEW, available from National Instruments.  Again, National Instruments supplies the cards and cables to connect the computer to the external device.

Analysis of Data. LabVIEW contains a vast array of mathematical and logical functions for analysing data. Several toolkits are available which extend this functionality even further.

Display and Storage of Data. LabVIEW can provide attractive and user-friendly Windows interfaces (see Cool Features). Data can be stored in text files or binary files. In addition, by communicating with other applications such as Microsoft Excel, Access and Word using ActiveX, LabVIEW can utilise the display and storage formats of those applications.  For example, LabVIEW can send data into an Excel spreadsheet and instruct Excel to save it as an "xls" file, or LabVIEW can produce reports in Word.

For information on LabVIEW programming at LiveWires, click here or contact us.