24-07-2012, 02:16 PM
LabVIEW Tutorial Manual
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Organization of This Manual
Each chapter discusses a different LabVIEW concept, although you
can design a VI that may incorporate several of these basic concepts.
Therefore, we encourage you to work through the entire tutorial before
you begin building your application.
Some of the chapters in this tutorial include an Additional Topics
section, which gives an overview of advanced LabVIEW features and
refers you to other documentation and example VIs.
This manual is organized as follows:
• Chapter 1, Introduction to LabVIEW, describes what LabVIEW is,
what a Virtual Instrument (VI) is, how to use the LabVIEW
environment (windows, menus, palettes, and tools), how to
operate VIs, how to edit VIs, and how to create VIs.
Customer Communication
National Instruments wants to receive your comments on our products
and manuals. We are interested in the applications you develop with
our products, and we want to help if you have problems with them. To
make it easy for you to contact us, this manual contains comment and
configuration forms for you to complete. These forms are in the
Appendix, Customer Communication, at the end of this manual.
Customer Education
National Instruments offers hands-on LabVIEW Basics and Advanced
courses to help you quickly master LabVIEW and develop successful
applications. The comprehensive Basics course not only teaches you
LabVIEW fundamentals, but also gives you hands-on experience
developing data acquisition and instrument control applications. The
follow-up Advanced course teaches you how to maximize the
performance and efficiency of LabVIEW applications. Contact
National Instruments for a detailed course catalog and for course fees
and dates.
Introduction to LabVIEW
This chapter describes what LabVIEW is, what a Virtual
Instrument (VI) is, how to use the LabVIEW environment (windows,
menus, palettes, and tools), how to operate VIs, how to edit VIs, and
how to create VIs.
Because LabVIEW is such a feature-rich program development
system, this tutorial cannot practically show you how to solve every
possible programming problem. Instead, this tutorial explains the
theory behind LabVIEW, contains exercises to teach you to use the
LabVIEW programming tools, and guides you through practical uses of
LabVIEW features as applied to actual programming tasks.
If you would like more training after using this manual, National
Instruments offers hands-on LabVIEW courses to help you quickly
master LabVIEW and develop successful applications.
The comprehensive LabVIEW Basics course not only teaches you
LabVIEW fundamentals, but also gives you hands-on experience
developing data acquisition (for Windows, Macintosh, and Sun) and
instrument control applications. The follow-up LabVIEW Advanced
course teaches you how to maximize the performance and efficiency of
LabVIEW applications in addition to teaching you the advanced
features of LabVIEW.
For a detailed course catalog and for course fees and dates, refer to the
address page on the inside front cover of this manual for information
about contacting National Instruments.
Introduction to LabVIEW
LabVIEW Tutorial Manual 1-2
National Instruments Corporation
Chapter Information
Each chapter begins with a section like the one that follows, listing the
learning objectives for that chapter.
You Will Learn:
• What LabVIEW is.
• What a Virtual Instrument (VI) is.
• How to use the LabVIEW environment (windows and palettes).
• How to operate VIs.
• How to edit VIs.
• How to create VIs.
What Is LabVIEW?
LabVIEW is a program development application, much like various
commercial C or BASIC development systems, or National
Instruments LabWindows. However, LabVIEW is different from those
applications in one important respect. Other programming systems use
text-based languages to create lines of code, while LabVIEW uses a
graphical programming language, G, to create programs in block
diagram form.
You can use LabVIEW with little programming experience. LabVIEW
uses terminology, icons, and ideas familiar to scientists and engineers
and relies on graphical symbols rather than textual language to describe
programming actions.
LabVIEW has extensive libraries of functions and subroutines for most
programming tasks. For Windows, Macintosh, and Sun, LabVIEW
contains application specific libraries for data acquisition and VXI
instrument control. LabVIEW also contains application-specific
libraries for GPIB and serial instrument control, data analysis, data
presentation, and data storage. LabVIEW includes conventional
program development tools, so you can set breakpoints, animate
program execution to see how data passes through the program, and
single-step through the program to make debugging and program
development easier.