There are compelling reasons why a LabVIEW developer or tester may want to consider using these new low-cost microcontrollers (such as the Arduino family of products) as opposed to expensive (therefore, much more accurate) hardware:
A vast area in development can be bypassed, at least in the early stages with off-the-shelf, less expensive, and open source hardware.
Not everyone needs top-of-the-line, the fastest, or the greatest (at any given time), hardware.
These platforms are by design, expandable, upgradable, and widely available. Supporting shields that are also widely available, if they can be used, drastically reduces development time.
And the most compelling reason, as far as the subject of this book is concerned, is that National Instrument's LabVIEW has been supporting these products for many years now. In fact, the second generation of firmware/development the VI library, which supports these products, has been released under LINX 1.0