National Instruments LabVIEW

National Instruments LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench) is an application development environment and system design platform designed by National Instruments. This program was first released in 1986. National Instruments LabVIEW provides users with tools used to create and deploy measurement and control systems that can be integrated with hardware components. This program is widely used by scientists and engineers to develop and test measurement instruments used in research and studies. National Instruments LabVIEW supports dataflow programming with a programming language called G. With dataflow programming, users create a graphic structural diagram with nodes that can be connected by virtual wires. Users may then test the structure by executing an input data flow. National Instruments LabVIEW also supports graphical programming by means of a tool called Virtual Instruments. Virtual Instruments contains three components a block diagram, a front panel, and a connector panel. The block diagram is a workspace where users can place components to form an instrument structure. The front panel contains various controls and indicators that allow users to input or extract data from a running virtual instrument, while the connector panel is used to represent the virtual instrument in the block diagram. The program’s graphical approach enables users to design programs by dragging and dropping virtual representations of laboratory equipment.

National Instruments LabVIEW features a simple interface that contains two main parts. First is the control toolbar that contains various buttons that execute actions in the workspace. Second part is the workspace where users can view, edit, and execute the program structures in block diagrams.