Self Taught LabView. Any Recommendations?

[madsci1016]

Hey guys,

I'm venturing to teach myself Labview as it seems like a powerful tool, and an easy way to build computer interfaces for robots. (Ardupilot's ground station is LabView)

Any of you guys know of a good tutorials for self taught Labview? I've googled, but to no avail.

Thanks in advance.  

[Admin]

I started teaching myself how to use LabView, got some basic projects working, but its GUI was over complicated with tons of annoying nuances.

I found it easier to simply write a program in C and look at the data using Excel. Learning VB will probably be more worth your time, as well.

[madsci1016]

Well, since i posted this, i figured out how to generate and parse NMEA type control sentences; so it's not been too hard to dive into so far.

I don't think i'll ever use this for data processing, more only as a robot interface. Robot status, display sensor data, plot location on google earth real time, etc.

What kind of stuff did you run into, Admin?

[Admin]

It was about 3 years ago . . . you seem to be having better luck than me though . . .

Basically I just felt the time to program it in C (or even learn VB) was less than the time needed to figure out how to use LabView.

I basically run experiments that require a lot of post-processing, nothing real-time, so Excel was just way easier.

[madsci1016]

I wish it was cheaper, or free, (the student edition is $70) as it seems like an easy way to build a computer interface for a robot, and once i learn it well enough, i'd love to write a tutorial on it, but it might not be worth it since it costs so much.

[Admin]

Well, if anything, open source your completed project file complete with instructions/documentation . . .

(I'll probably never use it, but I'm sure others might)

[hopslink]

Ardupilot's ground station is LabView

Sorry, it's a bit of an aside but that always struck me as odd for an open source community style project. Sure anyone can use the code (with a 100MB runtime download) but if you want to develop and redistribute code then there is a $1800 entry barrier.

Any of the common cross platform scripting languages Python, Perl, Ruby or Tcl would seem a more logical choice.

[madsci1016]

Well, my latest idea is to see if i can create a redistributable that is 'configurable' to a degree. Have a tutorial teaching about NMEA style data sentences, and be able to 'map' different fields to different gauges and graphs.

[Gertlex]

Doesn't the hardware for LabView plug and play stuff (e.g. from National Instruments) cost a lot, too?  It's a lose-lose setup for the hobbyist, it seems to me.

[madsci1016]

Hardware is only for laboratory data acquisition, and they have there own robot kit, but what i was going to do is completely software.