LabVIEW for Everyone Graphical Programming Made Easy and Fun

The #1 Step-by-Step Guide to LabVIEWNow Completely Updated for LabVIEW 8! Master LabVIEW 8 with the industryrs"s friendliest, most intuitive tutorial: LabVIEW for Everyone, Third Edition. Top LabVIEW experts Jeffrey Travis and Jim Kring teach LabVIEW the easy way: through carefully explained, step-by-step examples that give you reusable code for your own projects! This brand-new Third Edition has been fully revamped and expanded to reflect new features and techniques introduced in LabVIEW 8. Yours"ll find two new chapters, plus dozens of new topics, including Project Explorer, AutoTool, XML, event-driven programming, error handling, regular expressions, polymorphic VIs, timed structures, advanced reporting, and much more. Certified LabVIEW Developer (CLD) candidates will find callouts linking to key objectives on NIrs"s newest exam, making this book a more valuable study tool than ever. Not just what to do: why to do it! Use LabVIEW to build your own virtual workbench Master LabVIEWrs"s foundations: wiring, creating, editing, and debugging VIs; using controls and indicators; working with data structures; and much more Learn the "art" and best practices of effective LabVIEW development NEW: Streamline development with LabVIEW Express VIs NEW: Acquire data with NI-DAQmx and the LabVIEW DAQmx VIs NEW: Discover design patterns for error handling, control structures, state machines, queued messaging, and more NEW: Create sophisticated user interfaces with tree and tab controls, drag and drop, subpanels, and more Whatever your application, whatever your role, whether yours"ve used LabVIEW or not, LabVIEW for Everyone, Third Edition is the fastest, easiest way to get the results yours"re after!

Jeffrey Travis provides expert consulting and creates books, courses, and products for remote Internet controls and monitoring, virtual instrumentation, and Web applications through his company, Jeffrey Travis Studios. He has more than fifteen years of experience developing software, teaching, and consulting on LabVIEW and related technologies. He holds an M.S. in engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

 

Jim Kring is president of James Kring, Inc., a leader in LabVIEW development, system integration consulting, and custom software design. He is founder of OpenG, a foundation promoting open-source LabVIEW tools, applications, frameworks, and documentation.

Preface Preface LabVIEW 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--you can run LabVIEW on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. You can also run LabVIEW on PDAs (PalmOS, PocketPC, or Windows CE devices), on real-time platforms, and even embed LabVIEW programs into FPGA chips and 32-bit microprocessors. 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, sometimes 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 networked applications. 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. 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 logi