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Labview Study Guide

This document provides guidance on key topics for learning LabVIEW fundamentals. It lists various LabVIEW features and functions to understand, including numeric operations, indicators, controls, data types, loops, arrays, strings, file I/O, case structures, and mathscript. For each topic, it identifies important knowledge areas and skills, recommends relevant book references, and suggests study strategies like working through examples, recreating examples from class, and trying problems at the end of chapters. The overall document serves as a study guide for learning the essential LabVIEW concepts covered.

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Hussain Bin Ali
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55 views8 pages

Labview Study Guide

This document provides guidance on key topics for learning LabVIEW fundamentals. It lists various LabVIEW features and functions to understand, including numeric operations, indicators, controls, data types, loops, arrays, strings, file I/O, case structures, and mathscript. For each topic, it identifies important knowledge areas and skills, recommends relevant book references, and suggests study strategies like working through examples, recreating examples from class, and trying problems at the end of chapters. The overall document serves as a study guide for learning the essential LabVIEW concepts covered.

Uploaded by

Hussain Bin Ali
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Labview Features Covered

Numeric Operations, Basic Dataflow and Basic Indicators/Controls


Summary
Knowledge

Know what the circled icons (functions and controls) do.

Know the difference between various palette styles (modern, silver, classic….)

Know what the buttons on the tools palette all do

Know the different data types and how to convert between them when necessary

What does the wait icon do (the one that looks like a wristwatch)?

Skills to have

Make basic Vis using the above functions and controls. For example like the resistor divider calculator
example we did in class.

Run and single step through a VI

Basic labview operations like clean up broken wires, saving and opening, adding text and decorations,
finding errors, moving between windows, using context help and editing a block diagram and control
panel.

Book References

This is chapter 1 even though they don’t use all the numeric and Boolean functions and controls. Some
of the numeric functions aren’t use in any examples or not until some later chapter. You can also bring
up labview help, go to contents->Fundamentals, and read the through the first five or six chapters on
the basics.

Suggested Study Strategy

Try to do the problems at the end of chapter 1, redo any of the examples we did in class, create your
own functions with buttons, LEDs, math functions, controls and indicators. Single step through Vis until
you understand what is happening. Put indicators on all outputs and see what’s happening in the VI.
XY Graphs and Trig Functions

Knowledge

Know what the circled indicators do, what the differences are, how to use them

Understand the sin and cos functions on the mathematics palette

Skills

Be able to connect sin and cos functions to a waveform or XY indicator and do things like display
waveforms and circles

Book References

All of chapters1 and 2 should do it

Suggested Study Strategy

Work through the examples in the text. Don’t read the book – create the VIs that the book is doing.
Reading the book won’t help you.

While and For loops


Knowledge

Know how these work

Understand how the tunnels through the walls of the loops work, understand how indexing works…

Know the three main tunnel options

What is a shift register?

Skills
Be able to set up a for loop

Be able to set up a while loop and control the exit condition

Use shift registers in loops

Book References

All of chapters1 and 2 should do it. There’s a section in labview help->fundamentals on loops and other
structures.

Suggested Study Strategy

The same examples you did for the XY graphs above should do it. You can also try some of the end of
chapter problems to get better at applying while and for loops to real problems.

Arrays

Knowledge

Know the circled functions. Note that we might cover additional array functions later in the term and/or
you might find some of them useful when doing labs or your projects.

Know what a 1D array and a 2D array represent in labview and their relationship to array indicators and
controls

Know what it means to modify an array with a scalar numeric value

Skills
Be able to set up an array indicator or control using the “blank” array indicator/control and then adding
elements (numeric, string or other)

Set up arrays as indicators or controls using the right click->create method

Book References

All of chapters1 and 2 covers the basics. The first part of chapter 5 is helpful. There’s some more
material in chapter 6 but you have to get through a lot of math. Reading the help section-
>fundamentals->grouping data using strings, arrays, and clusters can also help if you kind of tune out
the material on clusters, which we’ve only briefly covered.

Suggested Study Strategy

The same examples you did for the XY graphs above should do a lot for you. Beyond that, for the array
operations above, just setting up some different VIs where you enter and display arrays is a good idea.

Strings

Knowledge
Know the circled functions. There are additional functions under “Additional String Functions” that I
won’t put on a quiz or test but might come in handy for programs. Under “Number/String Conversions”
just be aware of the main functions for converting string to number and vice versa.

Skills

Be able to process strings, look for specific fields/numbers in strings, assemble strings into larger strings.

Be able to manage arrays of strings (each array element is a string – similar to the 3D printer programs
we’ve been working on)

Book References

The book doesn’t do a good job of explaining strings and the lab view help section on strings is fairly
small. On the other hand, if you’ve pickup labview dataflow programming from the other sections,
string operations are a small jump forward.

Suggested Study Strategy

Use the examples I’ve done in class, most of which I’ve posted. You can also use the built-in labview
examples which are well documented. If you go to help->find examples->Fundamentals->Strings you
can load up VIs which cover most of the functions. Create your own examples using strings.

File I/O

Knowledge

The only I/O functions we’ve really looked at are the write and read spreadsheet functions that store
array contents into tab delimited files. Know how to use these.

Skills
Be able to set up a VI that writes an array to a file and reads from a file into an array

Book References

The first part of chapter 5.

Suggested Study Strategy

Work through the material in the first part of chapter 5 (up to about section 5.7)

Case Structures
Knowledge

Know the regular case structure (the one that starts with True/False) and the sequence structure. The
stacked sequence is basically identical to the regular sequence except that I guess it takes up less room
on the screen.

Know the differences between the flat sequence and the stacked sequence

Know how a case statement surrounded by a for loop (a state machine) is similar to a sequence

What is a shift register?

Skills

Be able to set up a VI that uses a true/false case structure

Set up a VI that expands on the true/false case structure into a multiple case structure switching on
numeric or other control inputs

Set up a sequence structure

Book References

Chapter 7.1 and 7.2 in the book. The rest of chapter 7 if you don’t get hung up on the math.

Suggested Study Strategy

Work through the material in sections 7.1 and 7.2 plus whatever examples we work on in class. I also
recommend working through the rest of chapter 7 if you don’t get hung up on the math. There’s a good
example to try on p 329 and try problems 1 and 6 from chapter 7.

Mathscript

Knowledge

Know what the mathscript node is for


Know how the formula node works (basically a simpler version of mathscript and without the separate
runtime window that makes it look like matlab)

Skills

Use the mathscript node to replace dataflow based math operations. Set up a mathscript node with
inputs, outputs and math operations.

Book References

All of chapter 3

Suggested Study Strategy

Work through the chapter 3 examples. There is a basic mathscript example under find examples-
>toolkits and modules->Mathscript RT module->Mathscript Fundamentals.

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