Wrap It Up

Wrap It Up!

LabVIEW's built-in functions facilitate hardware communication with external devices so you do not have to write involved programs. LabVIEW virtual instruments can work with several types of hardware to gather or exchange data: plug-in DAQ devices, GPIB controllers, serial ports (whether it's built-in or a USB-to-serial adaptor), or PXI and VXI hardware. You can use National Instruments DAQ devices, managed by LabVIEW, to read and generate analog input, analog output, and digital signals and also to perform counter/timer operations. LabVIEW can also control communication over the GPIB bus (assuming you have a GPIB controller) or command a PXI or VXI instrumentation system. If you don't have any special hardware, LabVIEW can communicate with other devices through your computer's serial port.

LabVIEW analysis VIs make it easy for you to process and manipulate data once you have brought it into your computer. Rather than working through tricky algorithms by hand or trying to write your own low-level code, you can simply access the built-in LabVIEW functions that suit your needs.

You can use LabVIEW's built-in Internet capabilities to publish images of your VIs to the web, as well as communicate with other programs and computers linked by a network using protocols such as NI-PSP or TCP/IP. LabVIEW supports ActiveX and .NET to communicate with other programs, and can both call and create shared libraries (such as DLLs, on Windows).

If you want to expand LabVIEW's considerable functionality, you can buy add-on toolkits to accomplish specific tasks. Toolkits are available to build standalone LabVIEW applications, enhance its Internet capabilities, design and analyze certain types of signals, perform statistical process and PID control, communicate with an SQL database, and much more. You can also download free add-ons from OpenG.org, an open source community that collaboratively develops LabVIEW add-ons.

The next chapters will teach you the fundamentals of LabVIEW programming, so get ready to writeer, that is, drawsome code!