On the hardware side, you will not need a lot for this first project of the book. The only thing you will need is an Arduino Uno board (https://www.adafruit.com/products/50). This is the same board that we will use in the rest of the book. You can use other boards as well, such as the Arduino Due or the Arduino Pro. However, I recommend that you stick with the Uno board for the whole book.
On the software side, you will need LabVIEW installed on your computer. For this book, I used LabVIEW 2014 for Windows. Of course, you can use LabVIEW on other platforms such as OS X or Linux. You can also use older versions, as the Arduino package that we will use is compatible with LabVIEW 2011 and above. If you don't have LabVIEW yet, you can find all the information at the following link:
After that, you will need the VIPM. This is free software that interfaces nicely with LabVIEW and allows you to automatically install new packages for LabVIEW...