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NI LabVIEW is a graphical programming language designed for engineers and scientists to develop test, control, and measurement applications. Created and optimized more than 20 years ago for engineers and scientists, the intuitive nature of LabVIEW graphical programming makes it easy for educators and researchers to incorporate the software in a range of courses and applications.
Graphical system design is a modern approach to designing, prototyping, and deploying embedded systems. It combines open graphical programming with hardware to dramatically simplify development.
Table of Contents
- Software Benefits
- Key Academic Features
- Instructor Benefits
- Student Benefits
- Summary
- Additional Resources
Software Benefits
LabVIEW gives you the flexibility of a powerful programming language without the complexity of traditional development environments. LabVIEW delivers extensive acquisition, analysis, and presentation capabilities in a single environment. Several LabVIEW characteristics contribute to a significant gain in productivity when compared to other development software.
Easy to Learn and Use:
- Intuitive graphical programming for faster development
- Optimized for engineers and scientists
- Data visualization for control design
Complete Functionality:
- Thousands of built-in analysis functions
- More than 200 signal processing and math functions
- Full programming language
Integrated I/O Capabilities:
- Seamless integrations with data acquisition devices for USB, Ethernet, PCI, PCI Express, and PXI/CompactPCI
- Thousands of instrument drivers for more than 250 vendors
- Fully integrated with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware
Key Academic Features
Students and educators worldwide apply LabVIEW in teaching and research. Teaching applications range from introductory classes to graduate-level studies, where LabVIEW can be used in classrooms and laboratories for in-class concept demonstrations, homework, and prototype implementation for student design projects. For research, LabVIEW fosters innovation in applications such as control design, embedded design, communication, structural design, nanotechnology, and more. Some benefits of LabVIEW in academia include the following:
Algorithm Engineering
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Traditionally, the process of designing and prototyping custom systems has separated theoretical design from prototyping. Algorithm engineering integrates the aspects of theoretical algorithm design with real-world data to more accurately verify and validate the results and behavior. |
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With LabVIEW, you can integrate algorithm engineering within a single environment to decrease the design cycle. By combining the theoretical models of the design using real-world signals, you can design, simulate, modify design parameters, and explore the algorithm implementation. Through this approach, you can benefit from higher-quality designs; avoid simulation-only challenges; and more rapidly design, prototype, and deploy your applications. To learn more about algorithm engineering, watch the webcast Engineering Your Algorithms by Combining Graphical and Textual Programming. |
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Multicore and Parallelism
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Multicore processors present new software challenges that must be overcome to fully take advantage of processing capabilities in a multithreaded application. Traditional programming languages require extensive knowledge of programming techniques to create processes to execute in parallel, a common way of maximizing the efficiency of programs. LabVIEW makes the implementation of such advanced programming techniques very simple. |
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LabVIEW is a dataflow language, which means that the graphical language constructs naturally represent the simple concept of parallel execution. For example, you can develop parallel-executing applications in LabVIEW by simply placing multiple loop structures in their code. The tasks can then execute on multiple processors, efficiently making use of all available resources. This simple concept, however, can be very difficult to implement in text-based languages that traditionally execute sequentially. To learn more about Multicore and parallelism, read the white paper Using the Latest Multicore Technologies for Teaching and Research.
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Instructor Benefits
Exploration of Concepts:
With LabVIEW, you can interactively explore design parameters, investigate solutions, and instrument your algorithm and theory-based relationships to effectively tie theory to practice. With the LabVIEW user interface, you can quickly create in-class interactive demos of the concepts, allowing students to change parameters dynamically and see what happens to the system as a result of their changes at run-time. This gives students an understanding of the concepts learned in class.
Improved Learning Experience:
The flexibility of graphical programming and customizable interfaces helps you spend more time teaching theory, investigating concepts, and developing applications and less time learning the tools. The LabVIEW block diagram looks similar to flow diagrams that are used to teach engineering concepts to students, which leads to a more intuitive transition from these concepts to programming.
>>See an example of signal processing by Mark Yoder.
Seamless Integration with Hardware to Design Experiments:
To completely understand the concepts, students need to build systems that interact with real-world signals. NI provides flexible and robust hardware that students can use in conjunction with LabVIEW to design and test simple experiments with a multi-instrument suite like the National Instruments Educational Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Suite (NI ELVIS) or conduct research with the industry-standard PXI modular instrumentation and field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based deployment targets such as NI CompactRIO.
Open Platform to Interface with Other Engineering Tools:
LabVIEW is an open platform designed to let you take advantage of other engineering tools to build the best system possible for your application. In academia, LabVIEW has capabilities to interface seamlessly with the leading tools used both in classroom and research.
Student Benefits
Accelerated Learning
Using LabVIEW to develop applications significantly reduces the learning curve because graphical representations are more intuitive design notations than text-based code. You can access the tools and functions through interactive palettes, dialogs, menus, and hundreds of function blocks, known as VIs (virtual instruments). You can drag and drop these VIs onto a diagram to define the behavior of your applications. This point-and-click approach shortens the time it takes to get from initial setup to a final solution.
>>Learn how students designed, prototyped, and deployed their senior design project in 13 weeks.
Industry Standard:
Since its introduction in 1986, LabVIEW has become the industry standard tool for measurement and control applications. With more than 25,000 industrial users, LabVIEW has been used in different kinds of applications from industrial automation to teaching concepts in schools. With its roots in test and measurement, LabVIEW is used to design, control, and test consumer products and systems such as MP3 and DVD players, cell phones, and vehicle air bag safety systems. Applications include helping to control the NASA Mars Pathfinder exploration to testing the Microsoft Xbox gaming consoles. LabVIEW is an open platform that has enabled an ecosystem to be developed including:
- More than 1,500 drivers for benchtop instruments from the Instrument Driver Network
- A discussion forum where LabVIEW users interact and get support from other LabVIEW users
- A dedicated developer zone to download and upload examples
- Training and certification resources to provide continual development for engineers and scientists
Summary
National Instruments is committed to enhancing engineering education worldwide by providing graphical programming software and modular hardware to bring together theoretical concepts and real-world applications. Educators are using NI tools to foster the next generation of innovators by creating a hands-on, experiential learning environment. Students and researchers alike are realizing designs that are changing the world around them with the application of graphical system design.
Additional Resources
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