Course on Interfacing Arduino and LabVIEW

Its been a long time I have made a video course on How to use arduino with LabVIEW , This video tutorial is more sufficient for anyone to get started with arduino and LabVIEW and start building their own projects using Arduino with LabVIEW, few years ago if anyone want's to make project using LabVIEW it's really hard for them using a low cost hardware like arduino, and also there is no plenty of resource or dedicated toolkit to work with arduino, but now the situation is different anyone can make their own projects in no time using arduino and LabVIEW, using arduino you can acquire physical world data to your LabVIEW and process all the functions with that, where you can use arduino as a data acquisition tool.

Arduino LabVIEW Linx,

To use Arduino with LabVIEW you need to have installed the toolkit called Linx in with your existing LabVIEW software to get your arduino speak with LabVIEW, you can find all the tutorial on how to install linx toolkit and what are the other requirements that you need to carry out to complete this video course on interfacing labview with arduino. LabVIEW uses serial communication to talk with arduino, you need to have Ni-Visa software to be installed with your LabVIEW, Ni-visa is responsible for connecting all the hardware to talk with LabVIEW. 

I have used a kit called Seeedstudio lotus for making this video, which is very easy to use for a new user getting started with arduino, Lotus is a arduino clone, you can use any type of arduino which supports by Linx, I recommend to anyone to start with Arduino Uno as it is more popular hardware in the Arduino family. 

You can also follow the book which also have all the tutorials given below as a step by step instruction and all the codes and necessary files that have done in this video tutorial are also given in the book, if you wish to buy it just give it a shot, but you don't need to have this book to complete this video tutorial, when you buy this book, it gives me a $1.8 which helps me to buy more hardware and experiment on new things. you can use Arduino Mega or Arduino Nano with this tutorial and start playing with LabVIEW, you can use your own custom hardware too, don't stop your experience learn always something new, add this one course to you that you something now.

click here to move to amazon to by this book

Introduction to the course in here you will get to know about what are things you needed to get started with this course, all the necessary things , in the introduction video you can find how to run your first example "LED blinking with labview and arduino" , it is really awesome to create a Graphical User Interface and play with arduino using LabVIEW, you don't need any prior experience to get yourself start for this tutorial,

For the below tutorial you need to have a Arduino board with Led to blink and a usb cable to connect to your computer, make sure you installing necessary software to make this thing happen in reality. don't stop with theory or video, get your hands on practice and learn something out of it. even if you fail to do, it is a experience that we gaining from instead of without practising.

Chapter 1: How to interface Arduino with LabVIEW and to blink an LED short and sweet video get you through start to finish and at the end you would have understand how easy is to do it, LabVIEW uses G-programming which is a drag and drop boxes and connecting it together and programming, you will become familiar with these things once get started, 

Chapter 2 How to acquire analog signal into LabVIEW from Arduino

As you might be aware that LabVIEW is mostly used for acquiring signals from external devices and process on it, there are many hardware that are available with NI , but the thing is, it is so costly and cannot afford by many people, Arduino can be replace those devices in acquiring and performing on signals in low level, we cannot compare Arduino to NI hardware those hardware are beast and workhorse.
In this video you will learn how to acquire analog signal and process on it using LabVIEW, analog signals are more useful and easy to read than digital , Sensors which gives different output based on its acting environment give analog output, when we read the signal into LabVIEW it varies from 0 to 5v based upon this level we can know the strength of the OUTPUT and we can do many things with this type of signal.

You need a Potentiometer or variable resistor to complete this tutorial, if possible check out google on how this potentiometer works and how it can vary the applied voltage when we rotating it, what is the principle behind it.

Chapter 3, How to control a PWM of an LED using Arduino and LabVIEW

In the previous video you would have learned about how to work with an LED and how to work with analog devices, in this tutorial you will know how to use the last tutorial and combined these tutorial together to work on this tutorial. PWM is the pulse width modulation , it will entire post if we start to talk about this PWM, in simple words lets control the brightness of an LED by controlling the voltage applied to the digital pin, you can use PWM to work with many realtime application most often in electronics to work with PWM we all will be introduced to control brightness of an LED at the initial stage.. 

You need the components that you used in the previous chapter to complete this tutorial 

Chapter 4, Automatic Light Controller using LDR

back in the days, you might be wonder how a light automatically turn off or on based upon the light intensity, later on you would have understand how it works and what basically makes this thing to get work, you still could see a wall clock which strike every hour and stops in the night time or its volume getting decreased based upon the intensity of lights. The reason behind all this work is a tiny little component known as LDR (light dependent resistor) in the last lessons we have controlled the LED brightness by manually turning the knob of the potentiometer, we have a force on those potentiometer to set its value, just like that this LDR being controlled by the external light, its resistance will shoot up if the light intensity is low or it may go up based on the type of resistor material and manufacturing process.

you need a LDR and LED's to make this tutorial work for you, meanwhile if you how to work with relay you can interface relay to it and control your AC lights and fans to automatically turn on and off with light as an factor..

Chapter 5, How to read digital Input

until now in all these tutorials we have only used digital pins as an output to turn on and off or control some LED's , what if you want to read a digital pin, this is a simple task in LabVIEW, we can easily know the state of a pin just by calling a block to read digital pin and selecting the pin to read.

What's the deal in it and why we should read a digital pin, we usually use this feature to know the input from other devices, we use button as a input device and attach with arduino can be useful to know how this function works, we can use these digital input to understand interrupt and also many feature can be done using this digital input button.

You need a button and a LED to complete this tutorial.

Chapter 6 How to work with accelerometer 

In this video tutorial you will know how to acquire accelerometer data and plot a graph upon it, it is really a piece of cake when you using I2C devices with linx and labview they have all the functions to make it work. Try to learn more about i2c protocol how this devices works, you can connect upto 128 i2c devices arduino., what allows this possible? who made this protocol? how fast as this device respond? what is the difference between i2c and spi? if you are getting questions like this then you are learning, google and get your feet under it to check answer for all the stupid questions that came to my mind when started with i2c.

what you need ? an adxl accelerometer and an arduino to make this work

Chapter 7, Servo motor with LabVIEW and Arduino 

it is always fun to work this little guys as they respond quickly and also eats lot of power these tiny guys have more muscle power than the ordinary motors, if you are more curious please try to make a toy car out of a tower pro 9g servo and a toy motor (plane motor without gear), you toy motor never move the car an inch, just find the reason for it? if you learn about it, things will become quite interesting later on. give it a try.

you need a servo motor and Arduino and you should connected your arduino with external power, power supplied from your computer through USB will not be sufficient enough to drive this crazy power hungry fellows.

Chapter 8, working with AC appliances 

In the earlier chapter we have already talked about relay and what you can do about it? are we? not at all but there is a hint on relay given in the previous chapter , hope you learn about it?

if you completed learning about relay and more important if you know more about AC circuit and its operation go ahead on this project. arduino and labVIEW don't have direct control over your AC appliance , this video is just like turn on and off an LED but what make possible to control a AC light or fan is the relay , he is the hero for this tutorial, make sure you learnt all that and take necessary precaution before trying this tutorial.

Check my YouTube channel for more video tutorial like this , pass on your comments and suggestions and where we can improve it, @ jayakumarmagesh@gmail.com , don't foreget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and if you like or hate this video go and bash in YouTube comment section and leave your comments. Thank you reaching this point as I am happy to help someone out there

Limitation of this video tutorial: as this tutorial is more focussed on beginners many concepts were not explored in the future you can expect videos on how to add custom command and how to add more sensor supports to these videos, and also learn about more frequency interfaced devices like DHT11, DHT22, DHT23, DHT33, with arduino and labview, there is also a support will be added to one wire and other features, if you want to use an LCD screen with Arduino and Labview you can use an I2C LCD which is supported well.