Labview for Everyone

Preface LabVIEW, or Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench, is a graphical programming language that has been widely adopted throughout industry, academia, and research labs as the standard for data acquisition and instrument control software. LabVIEW is a powerful and flexible instrumentation and analysis software system that is multiplatform (predating Java, which makes the same claim)--you can run LabVIEW on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX. Personal computers are much more flexible than standard instruments, and creating your own LabVIEW program, or virtual instrument (VI), is simple. LabVIEW's intuitive user interface makes writing and using programs exciting and fun! LabVIEW departs from the sequential nature of traditional programming languages and features an easy-to-use graphical programming environment, including all of the tools necessary for data acquisition (DAQ), data analysis, and presentation of results. With its graphical programming language, called "G," you program using a graphical block diagram that compiles into machine code. Ideal for a countless number of science and engineering applications, LabVIEW helps you solve many types of problems in only a fraction of the time and hassle it would take to write "conventional" code. Beyond the Lab LabVIEW has found its way into such a broad spectrum of virtual instrumentation applications that it is hard to know where to begin. As its name implies, it began in the laboratory and still remains very popular in many kinds of laboratories--from major research and development laboratories around the world (such as Lawrence Livermore, Argonne, Batelle, Sandia, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, White Sands, and Oak Ridge in the United States and CERN in Europe), to R&D laboratories in many industries, and to teaching laboratories in universities all over the world, especially in the disciplines of electrical and mechanical engineering and physics. The spread of LabVIEW beyond the laboratory has gone in many directions--up (aboard the space shuttle), down (aboard U.S. Navy submarines), and around the world (from oil wells in the North Sea to factories in New Zealand). And with the latest Internet capabilities, LabVIEW applications are being deployed not only physically in many places but virtually across cyberspace. More and more people are creating web-based control or monitoring of their LabVIEW applications to allow remote access and instant information about what's happening in their lab. Virtual instrumentation systems are known for their low cost, both in hardware and development time, and their great flexibility. Is it any wonder that they are so popular? The Expanding World of Virtual Instrumentation Perhaps the best way to describe the expansion (or perhaps explosion) of LabVIEW applications is to generalize it. There are niches in many industries where measurements of some kind are required--most often of temperature, whether it be in an oven, a refrigerator, a greenhouse, a clean room, or a vat of soup. Beyond temperature, users measure pressure, force, displacement, strain, pH, and so on, ad infinitum. Personal computers are used virtually everywhere. LabVIEW is the catalyst that links the PC with measuring things, not only because it makes it easy, but also because it brings along the ability to analyze what you have measured and display it and communicate it halfway around the world if you so choose. After measuring and analyzing something, the next logical step often is to change (control) something based upon the results. For example, measure temperature and then turn on either a furnace or a chiller. Again, LabVIEW makes this easy to do; monitoring and control have become LabVIEW strengths. Sometimes it is direct monitoring and control, or it may be through communicating with a programmable logic controller (PLC) in what is commonly called supervisory controTravis, Jeffrey is the author of 'Labview for Everyone', published 2001 under ISBN 9780130650962 and ISBN 013065096X.