What is LabVIEW?

LabVIEW, a graphical, data-flow driven programming language, created by National Instruments and first shipped in 1986, opened the world of computer programming to non-programming scientists and engineers by enabling them to SEE how to program. LabVIEW has functional icons that are connected together using a wiring tool – just like prototyping a circuit on a test bench. This graphical way of programming has been an eye-opening experience to thousands of people, a recent survey by Test & Measurement World magazine showed LabVIEW as the fourth most popular programming language for data acquisition and/or instrument control, behind Visual Basic, C and C++.

LabVIEW makes the concept of Virtual Instrumentation (VI) a reality. The objective in virtual instrumentation is to use a general purpose computer to mimic real instruments with their dedicated controls and displays, but with the added versatility that comes with software. Instead of buying a strip-chart recorder, an oscilloscope and a spectrum analyzer, you can buy one high-performance analog-to-digital converter and use a computer running LabVIEW to simulate all of these instruments and more. The virtual instrumentation concept is so fundamental to the way that LabVIEW works that the programs you write in LabVIEW are in fact called VIs. You use simple instruments (subVIs) to build more complex instruments just as you use subprograms to build a more complex main program in a conventional programming language.

Figure 1: a spectrum analyzer written in the LabVIEW graphical programming language. When you write a program in LabVIEW you connect functional icons together to form virtual instruments. Virtual instruments use a general purpose computer to mimic real instruments. By embedding virtual instruments into small form-factor PCs you can create an whole new class of physical instruments.

LabVIEW comes with an enormous library of virtual instruments containing analysis routines, DSP functions, functions used for communication and control of external instruments as well as the functions you need to build your own custom virtual instruments. LabVIEW has built in support for tcp/ip networking and even includes its own web server so you can interact with your virtual instruments from the web or from virtual instruments on other computers. LabVIEW is designed to let you easily build networked data acquisition and control systems.

One of the cool things about LabVIEW is that programs written in LabVIEW's “G” graphical language on one platform can be recompiled on another platform without modification as long as they do not call any platform specific functions, i.e. Windows ActiveX components. Currently LabVIEW runs on Windows, Macintosh, Sun, HP-UX and, since 1998, on x86 Linux.

Because LabVIEW is cross-platform there is a large code base that can be leveraged into creating the next generation of instrumentation. The combination of LabVIEW's easy, intuitive graphical language with the stability of the modular Linux operating system makes LabVIEW and Linux the perfect fit for rapidly building sophisticated embedded instrumentation.

• Part 1: Introduction
  
• Part 2: What is LabVIEW?
  
• Part 3: Why use a desktop OS to build an embedded system?
  
• Part 4: Getting to know VMware
  
• Part 5: Six steps to Building an Embedded Linux System
  
• Part 6: Deploying on the hardware
  
• Part 7: Conclusion

 
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