Chapter 1. Welcome to LabVIEW and Arduino

National Instruments Corporation, NI, is a world leader when it comes to automated test equipment and virtual instrumentation software. LabVIEW is a product that they have developed, and it is being used in many labs throughout the world. LabVIEW, which stands for Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench, is programmed with a graphical language known as G; this is a dataflow programming language. LabVIEW is supported by Visual Package Manager (VIPM). VIPM contains all the tools and kits to enhance the LabVIEW product.

Arduino is a single-board microcontroller. The hardware consists of an open source hardware board that is designed around the Atmel AVR Microcontroller. The intention of Arduino was to make the application of interactive components or environments more accessible. Arduinos are programmed via an integrated development environment (IDE) and run on any platform that supports Java. An Arduino program is written in either C or C++ and is programmed using its own IDE.

Welcome to programming Arduino with LabVIEW. During the course of this book, we will take you through working with Arduino through NI's LabVIEW product. The following are what you will need:

We will work with Servos, LEDs, and Potentiometers in both analog and digital configurations.