Overview of Labview

Overview of Labview

For instrumentation related projects, Labview plays an important role as a simulation environment. I would like to give some basics of lab view for the beginners.

LabVIEW short for Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench is a platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments. LabVIEW is commonly used for data acquisition and instrument control. The programming language used in LabVIEW, called G, is a dataflow language.
LabVIEW ties the creation of user interfaces (called front panels) into the development cycle. LabVIEW programs/ subroutines are called Virtual Instruments (Vis). Each VI has three components: a block diagram, a front panel and a connector pane. The later may represent the VI as a subVI in block diagrams of calling Vis. Controls and indicators on the front panel allow an operator to input data into or extract data from a running virtual instrument. However, the front panel can also serve as a programmatic interface.
The graphical approach also allows non programmers to build programs by simply dragging and dropping virtual instrument representations of the lab equipment with which they are already familiar. The LabVIEW programming environment, with the included examples and the documentation, makes it simpler to create small applications, many libraries with a large number of functions for data acquisition, signal generation, mathematics, statistics, signal conditioning, analysis, etc., along with numerous graphical interface elements are provided in several LabVIEW package options.