ITWissen.info - Tech know how online

laboratory virtual instrument engineering workbench (LabVIEW)

LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench) is a graphical program development environment from National Instruments and uses the G programming language. It is a platform-independent system for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Unix. The programming language was developed in 1983 by Jeff Kodosky in cooperation with the University of Texas. In the meantime, the National Instruments Corporation already distributes version 8.6 (August 2008) and accordingly the application areas have also become more diverse.

A LabVIEW program is called a virtual instrument( VI), since appearance and functionality are based on a real instrument. The structuring of complex problems is made possible with the help of subprograms - the so-called SubVIs. The program is created graphically and consists in each case of a front panel and the block diagram. The front panel realizes the interactive user interface of the program. With their production at the same time parts of the G- source code - namely the objects for the block diagram - are generated. The block diagram represents the program logic of the virtual instrument (VI).

Screenshot of a LabViEW document, Screenshot: pressebox.de

Screenshot of a LabViEW document, Screenshot: pressebox.de

The components of a block diagram are subordinate subVIs, predefined functions, constants and program flow structures such as branches, case distinctions or repeat loops. The essential difference to text-based programming languages is that LabVIEW is based on the paradigm of data flow. For this purpose, the individual components in the block diagram are connected to each other via data flows - also called wires.

The graphic G- compiler produces thereby directly a very fast executable program code, which is comparable from the performance quite with C++. The functionality of the data flow provides products of the parallelization and the and multitasking.

LabVIEW has by its intuitively learnable structures as well as by the continuous further development of interfaces and functions for most different ranges of application a high spreading in particular in the measuring technique and the automation technology.

Informations:
Englisch: laboratory virtual instrument engineering workbench - LabVIEW
Updated at: 16.07.2009
#Words: 317
Links: program, programming language (PL), platform, system, MacIntosh operating system extended (Mac OS X)
Translations: DE
Sharing:    

All rights reserved DATACOM Buchverlag GmbH © 2024