Introduction
LabVIEW offers a graphical programming approach that helps you visualize every aspect of your application, including hardware configuration, measurement data and debugging. This visualization makes it easier to integrate measurement hardware from any vendor, represent complex logic in the diagram, develop data analysis algorithms and design custom user interfaces.
Requirements
Here you have the link to check out the available PLC systems on our website which you can use in LabView platform:
Software requirements
Preparing the programming environment
For this tutorial, it will be assumed that we already have our industrial PLC, the installed Arduino IDE and the National Instruments LabVIEW software. Maybe, if you have already worked with Serial communication with either any microcontroller and LabVIEW, it is possible that you have already installed the NI Visa plug-in, but if that is not the case we will explain below the necessary requirements to perform its installation
In order to work and enable communication ports and interfaces from LabVIEW, we have to install the NI Visa plug-in as mentioned and fortunately, National Instruments offers it to us free of charge from its official website. To proceed to install it, we will download it from here
NOTE: Install programming environments such as NI LabVIEW before installing this product.
There we can see the different versions of NI Visas as detailed in the following image for which we will choose to download the most recent version by clicking on the first link (in this case the NI Visa 19.0 version is being used, for other versions, the procedure may vary slightly but in general the steps are usually performed similarly). Select your own Operating System (Windows or MAC OS).
NOTE: Before downloading Labview Environment, you must create your own National Instruments account.
Like many of the National Instruments add-ons, it is first necessary to unzip the downloaded installer by following the steps below:
In the next step (and like in any typical installation) we will give the classic “Next” in the windows that are required and we will accept the corresponding terms.
In the end, we will see a window asking us to restart our equipment, however, we give you the option “Restart Later” to proceed with the download of VI Package Manager add-on.
NOTE: Select the FREE version, it will allow us to install Labview add-ons
At the end of the installation, we will be ready to open the VI Package Manager, which when opened for the first time, takes a few minutes until we can see the complete add-on list.
Now, we proceed to locate and select “LabVIEW Interface for Arduino” from the list and click on the “Install Package” option as shown below. This is the package that will allow us to manipulate our industrial Arduino board from LabView.
Double-click on the Labview Interface for Arduino to install
From this point, we have already installed all the programs that are required to use our Industrial Shields equipment in Labview.
New steps
In the following post of the blog related to Labview, we will see a first example controlling a digital output with PWM of our Arduino-based programmable logic controller PLC and we will see the different possibilities offered by Labview.
Installing Labview and necessary add-ons on a PLC Arduino