LabVIEW Tutorials

Introduction

These video-based tutorials are made to help students learn LabVIEW programming. Each of videos has mainly one focus. The videos show, at a careful speed, every single step of the programming. No steps are hidden. 

LabVIEW is a software development system produced by National Instruments Inc. for industrial, experimental, and educational measurement and automation applications based on graphical programming. However, textual programming with C, MATLAB and Mathscript (which is similar to MATLAB) is supported. LabVIEW has a large number of functions for numerical analysis and design and visualization of data for applications in areas as mathematics, control, signal processing, system identification, simulation, etc. LabVIEW has inbuilt support for the broad range of measurement and automation hardware produced by National Instruments, but it also supports communication with third party hardware using standards as OPC, Modbus, GPIB, etc.

I have been using LabVIEW for more than 15 years in many practical projects about monitoring, automatic control, and simulation. I like LabVIEW because of its user-friendly graphical programming environment and the comprehensive set of functions, and I am glad to introduce it to students. As an example, here is the front panel of a simulated temperature control system implemented in LabVIEW, and here is a part of the block diagram of the same program. The user interface is implemented with the front panel, while the functionality is always implemented in the block diagram, where the code typically is graphical, but with the possibility to include textual code, as in this example.

Remember that there is an infinite number of ways to solve a given programming task. Therefore, you should not regard the videos as showing the only way to program. You will probably develop your own style.

LabVIEW 2016 is used in the videos. The videos are probably relevant also for older LabVIEW versions (however, I have not checked this in detail).

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Videos

The videos will be streamed to your browser if opened in e.g. Chrome and Internet Explorer. Feel free to send me comments about errors and suggestions for improvements (email address is given above).

Note 1: Some of the videos are in two parts to obtain videos of max length 1 h (a requirement in Dropbox).

Note 2: In some of the videos, links to downloadable VIs (LabVIEW programs) are displayed. By 25. Aug. 2018 these links have been changed. The new links are shown in the list below. (The links displayed in the videos have not been changed, though, so they are still “wrong”.)

• Introduction: Programming and running a simple VI: Part 1. Part 2.
• Overview over the Controls palette and the Functions palette
• Customizing the programming environment
• Creating information about your VIs
• Organizing Front panels using Tab control
• Organizing Block diagram code using SubVIs
  File to download (cf. the video):
  http://techteach.no/tutorials/labview/subvi/subvi_basis.vi
• Collecting VIs in LabVIEW Library (LLB) files
• Setting VI properties
• Property nodes
• Clusters
• Arrays
• For loops and While loops
• Charts
• Graphs
• Shift register and Feedback node
• Local variables
• Matlab node
• Concurrent While loops
• Case structures
• State machine (continuation of above video about case structure). Bicycle example.
• Writing to datafile
  Files to download (cf. the video):
  http://techteach.no/tutorials/labview/write_to_datafile/mydatawrite.vi
  http://techteach.no/tutorials/labview/write_to_datafile/datafile_250816.lvm (the data file)
• Simulation of dynamic systems: Part 1. Part 2.
  Files to download are available at (cf. the video):
  http://techteach.no/labview/goldmine/
• Analog IO (input and output) with LabVIEW and NI USB-6008
  Files to download (cf. the video):
  http://techteach.no/tutorials/labview/labview_analog_voltage_single_io.vi
  http://techteach.no/tutorials/labview/analog_io/labview_analog_voltage_multiple_io.vi

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By Finn Aakre Haugen, PhD. Email: finn.haugen@usn.no.
Updated 22 March 2022.