Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW) is a graphical system design and development platform produced and distributed by National Instruments, based on a programming environment that uses a visual programming language. It is widely used for data acquisition, instrument control, and industrial automation. It provides tools for designing and deploying complex test and measurement systems.
The visual (aka graphical) programming language is called “G” (not to be confused with G-code). It is a dataflow language originally developed by National Instruments. LabVIEW is supported on a variety of operating systems (OSs), including macOS and other versions of Unix and Linux, as well as Microsoft Windows.
The latest versions of LabVIEW are LabVIEW 2024 Q3 (released in July 2024) and LabVIEW NXG 5.1 (released in January 2021). National Instruments released the free for non-commercial use LabVIEW and LabVIEW NXG Community editions on April 28, 2020.
Common application design patterns
Applications in LabVIEW are typically designed using well-known architectures known as design patterns. The most common design patterns for graphical LabVIEW applications are listed below…..
| Design pattern | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Functional Global Variable | Exchange information without using global variables |
| State machine | Controlled execution that depends on past events |
| Event-driven user interface | Lossless processing of user actions |
| Master-slave | Run independent processes simultaneously |
| Producer-consumer | Asynchronous or multithreaded execution of loops |
| Queued state machine with event-driven producer-consumer | Highly responsive user-interface for multithreaded applications |
