What can a student do in labview?

[Kiddi]

Hello. My teacher told me to choose a technical task. Can you give me some ideas? My ability Labview is a beginner.

[Antoine Chalons]

Do you have access to any hardware?

 

"Technical task" is a bit vague... A few years ago I started playing around with https://projecteuler.net/

It was a fun way to practice algorithms with LabVIEW, I think I solved the first 50 or 60. I'm not sure if this is "technical"

 

Any idea on what you like to do? Any special interest? What's your course?

[hooovahh]

How about something with the File IO?  Maybe copy all files and folders from one location to another and list the files that were new or overwritten?  Maybe open a text file with times and values in it then graph it?  Maybe import a text file into a table and color the values that are greater than some value red, and lower than some value green?

[Mads]

Here is one that involves a nice mix of small challenges:

My first assignment after being hired as an engineer back in 1998 was to write a multiplexer and demultiplexer. In that case we had 8 instruments outputting readings as an ASCII string every second (fixed length message containing a numeric value: "AA        2500BB\r\n"), and all those strings had to be read from 8 separate serial ports, tagged with a channel (c1, c2, c3 etc..) and then sent on through a single serial link (because we physically only had two wires available) to another PC where the signals would be split into the original 8 live values...Unless you are already familiar with serial IO you might want to simulate the physical parts at first to finish the downstream logic, then you can add the physical / serial communication bits at the end (in case you end up spending too much time on that to finish everything).

Edited February 3 by Mads

[ShaunR]

Do something you are actually interested in and will be able to use beyond the mere task of learning to program.

If you have a hobby, then program something to solve an annoying aspect of the hobby, Perhaps it's that you have to keep printing out user manuals. Perhaps you have to keep calculating something over and over. Identify an issue and solve it programmatically in a way that will actually be useful to you.

If you are a gamer, then maybe something to do with how the game operates. For example. Maybe damage output is dependent on a number of aspects such as  weapons or various statistics. Write something that enables you to ascertain what combinations are best for your character or simulates gear changes for different scenarios.

Maybe you are into Astrology or Numerology so you can write something that calculates the positions of constellations or the number significance of names.

The point of programming is to solve problems. Find a problem that is close to what you know and love and the programming will come along with a solution you can use to make your life a little bit easier. Your current issue is that your problem scope is infinite. Narrow it down to something close to you. Maybe write a program to help ;)

[Stagg54]

On 2/3/2021 at 1:51 AM, Antoine Chalons said:

Do you have access to any hardware?

 

"Technical task" is a bit vague... A few years ago I started playing around with https://projecteuler.net/

It was a fun way to practice algorithms with LabVIEW, I think I solved the first 50 or 60. I'm not sure if this is "technical"

 

Any idea on what you like to do? Any special interest? What's your course?

Project Euler is good.

So is Advent of Code.

You can also check out any of the code katas. There's a ton out there.

Also there is a book called "Automate The Boring Stuff With Python." It is in Python, but the projects are very practical. They could almost all easily be translated into LabVIEW.

[Lipko]

If you are a student, I'm pretty sure there are boring tasks that can be automated. Something that's special so you are not likely to find existing tools.

But since you are a student, simply reinventing something, cloning a board game you like (I make minesweeper in pretty much any programming languages I work with), remaking msPaint is not a "stupid" decision as it would be as a pro.

For example for work, I did a picture manager program. Pictures can drag+drop sorted, comments can be assigned, picture entries can be colored (for marking purposes), images can be cropped with arbitrary angled rectangles. And all pictures can be inserted into a Word document using the report generation toolkit and some VB scripting.
This is just a small tool but it can be extended infinitely and has lot of areas that you can practice. And doesn't need any hardware (measurement or controller devices). Just a computer.

EDIT: in general, Labview is a pretty productive language for GUI heavy applications. Graphs are very typical Labview things and they can be customized beyond a mere measurement plotting widget. So for a student project I would prefer something that involves graphs in some ways, usual or unusual ways (like some task scheduler or fancy calendar-thing, just throwing ideas).

Another idea is making some cellular automata, like Conway's game of life. You could and controls to it, maybe even drawing the initial filled cells (you have to solve the rendering of the field: table?/graph?/picture? and you have to handle mouse clicks) and add some additional graphs that plot some interesting data vs. time diagrams. Like the percentage of alive cells, or whatever. Maybe you could also make some overlay heat map on the field to see if there are places that alive cells are more common.
You could add a menu to switch between different automatas. Maybe adding an option of hexagonal field.

Man, now I want to make it 😣

Edited May 13 by Lipko