National Instruments LabVIEW: A Programming Environment for Laboratory Automation and Measurement

National Instruments LabVIEW is a graphical programming language that has its roots in automation control and data acquisition. Its graphical representation, similar to a process flow diagram, was created to provide an intuitive programming environment for scientists and engineers. The language has matured over the last 20 years to become a general purpose programming environment. LabVIEW has several key features which make it a good choice in an automation environment. These include simple network communication, turnkey implementation of common communication protocols (RS232, GPIB, etc.), powerful toolsets for process control and data fitting, fast and easy user interface construction, and an efficient code execution environment. We discuss the merits of the language and provide an example application suite written in-house which is used in integrating and controlling automation platforms.