What is LabVIEW

[Jeff Pahl]

From the NI website: "NI LabVIEW is the graphical development environment for creating flexible and scalable test, measurement, and control applications rapidly and at minimal cost. With LabVIEW, engineers and scientists interface with real-world signals, analyze data for meaningful information, and share results and applications. Regardless of experience, LabVIEW makes development fast and easy for all users."

The most important thing to understand is that LabVIEW is a programming language, just like C, or Visual Basic, or Java. The big differences are that it is a graphical language, where the programmer creates applications by connecting graphical icons, similar to creating a spreadsheet, and then by defining various properties for the icons. The other difference is that it is one of the specialty languages that are specifically tailored for test & measurement applications, so it contains objects that specifically address connecting to data acquisition equipment, and for doing mathematical analysis. Right out of the box, LabVIEW (or any language) will not do anything until you create an application.

The NI DAQ module does ship with a Data Logger application, that you can use right out of the box to acquire data to look at later.