Good books for Labview 7.1.1?

[jccorreu]

I'm looking for recommendations for a few good books about programming control systems with Labview 7.1.1. I do not know when I'll make a transition to 8.5+.

The following is my attempt to give a little idea of where I am at and where I am going, in the hopes it may give anyone reading this the background necessary to offer some reasonable recommendations.

I'm still fairly green with control systems and labview. I've been programming for many years in many text based languages, but never control systems. I've had an instrumentation lab as part of my undergrad physics degree that was a very basic intro to electrical components and circuits, and labview on XP. Since then I've been working for 9 months on a project, essentially teaching myself control systems, data aquisition and LabView. So this means my knowledge is a hodge-podge. I've come a long way, and I realize there are things I do not understand properly. As I make changes, additions, etc., I keep coming across bugs and efficiency problems with my code. My fear is that it has become a patch-work, instead of a well-designed work, and that I need a deeper and more extensive overview of the Labview language and the ideas behind controls system programming.

I communcaite using DAQMX7.5, and VISA, over analog and digital NI boards, and also rs232 and rs485 devices. As far as Labview architecture I use combinations of all the standard models that are discussed in help files and forums, and I use queues, notifiers, references, and property nodes extensively.

The projects are for experiments and all tend to require

1) reading from a combination of devices, usually from 20-80, over a combination of above methods, with a user-defined interval as low as 500ms

2) writing to a combination of devices, usually more than I read from, as pre-defined processes, also with user-defined intervals as low as 100ms

3) manually writing to devices as on-the-fly variations of pre-defined processes (i.e. user event interupts and changes occuring write process)

4) a fair bit of user activity on a front panel

5) so the code I've written has been an attempt at a solid core with modular components that can be switched out for each client

6) have to be reliable and safe

Also, how valuable are the courses that NI offers? There are many bits of Labview I know nothing about, some perhaps basic and certainly much that is advanced, and some bits I know a fair deal of, but could perhaps benefit from getting a true developers level of knowledge concerning. And then there is the electrical and control systems knowledge in general (seperate from programming language knowledge) that I am at a definite disadvantage with.

As always I appreciate your feedbacks

James

[PaulG.]

Since you are still in 7.1 I would recommend LabVIEW for Everyone, 2nd Edition, and one of my favorites is A Software Engineering Approach to LabVIEW.

SEAL teaches a good approach to overall design and managing code complexity. Also, spending a lot of time here and in NI's forums will be very helpful. NI Developer Zone has a ton of sample code and examples.

Your greatest source of frustration will be your head's transition from text-based, procedural programming to graphic, data-flow programming. Many C/text programmers I've met got really frustrated the first few months learning LV ... and their code looked like it ... but they came around.

Personally, I think anyone who programs in C needs to have his/her head examined.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

QUOTE (PaulG. @ Apr 3 2008, 10:50 AM)

Since you are still in 7.1 I would recommend LabVIEW for Everyone, 2nd Edition, and one of my favorites is A Software Engineering Approach to LabVIEW.

SEAL teaches a good approach to overall design and managing code complexity. Also, spending a lot of time here and in NI's forums will be very helpful. NI Developer Zone has a ton of sample code and examples.

Your greatest source of frustration will be your head's transition from text-based, procedural programming to graphic, data-flow programming. Many C/text programmers I've met got really frustrated the first few months learning LV ... and their code looked like it ... but they came around.

Personally, I think anyone who programs in C needs to have his/her head examined.

No no! But it helps to unload everything you learned for C programming when starting with LabVIEW. The only thing worse to learn LabVIEW are Basic programmers. I for one started with Pascal, then learned LabVIEW and found it a God send, and after that only learned C. And there are simply areas where C is more appropriate than LabVIEW. But I would never code an UI in anything but LabVIEW.

Rolf Kalbermaltter