LabVIEW is a higher-level programming language used widely in science and engineering. LabVIEW is made by National Instruments, who, with LEGO, created both EV3 and its immediate predecessor, NXT. The entire EV3 LEGO MINDSTORMS software is based on LabVIEW and is meant to be a kid-friendly version of the more advanced software. There are middle schools, which have LabVIEW integrated into their curriculum so that the learning curve is not that high. You can find copies of the student edition of LabVIEW for under $50, which is a bargain compared to the full professional edition that is over $1,000! For this chapter, I used the 2014 version of LabVIEW with the LEGO MINDSTORMS add-on modules. LabVIEW works fine on both Macs and PCs. The EV3 add-ons were released in the fall of 2014. At the time of writing this book, not all of the NXT features were fully updated for EV3.

When you first start a robot project in LabVIEW you use the Schematic Editor to assign the EV3 ports to your sensors...