Beginner LabVIEW Tasks [closed]

Question

I am on a FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) team, and we plan on using LabVIEW to program our robot. I was wondering if anyone had any basic LabVIEW tasks that we could use to learn LabVIEW before we begin the actual programming of our robot?

EDIT: Most of the programmers have at least a basic understanding of programming, and are coming from another language.

Answer 1

I believe the best thing would be to go through the getting started tutorial of LabVIEW: http://digital.ni.com/manuals.nsf/websearch/EC6EF8DE9CB98742862576F7006B0E1E

The reason I say that is because they contain exercises between every lesson, and you could attempt to do that without having a look at the solution.

Also, the following site has the 3-hour and 6-hour course on LabVIEW which could be approached in the same way: http://www.ni.com/academic/labview_training/

Also, if you need guidance for that particular project, I don't mind getting involved to mentor your team on it. You could provide me with the contact details of your teacher/professor and I can get in touch with them.

Take Care Adnan

Answer 2

I was also on a FIRST team for a while, and I taught the programmers while I was there. I found that the best way to get the language down was to practice with some simple projects which solidify data-flow and other important concepts in the mind.

A few:

A stop light with user-manipulable controls for how fast each light should stay on. Once you've got that down, fix it so that the user can only change stopping distance and speed limit. That way you work in some of the math functions.

I always taught some of the basic concepts, like loops and shift registers, with imaginary killbots. A killbot has a pre-set kill limit (for for loops), and has to keep track of how many hits it gets with shift registers.

I certainly wouldn't go with NI's training things. They only managed to confuse the new programmers, even the ones with experience in other languages. I also found it best not to teach the concept of global variables, which NI does, because it breaks the whole point of LabVIEW, data-flow.

Wow. That was long winded.

Answer 3

While I haven't gone through them, Ben Zimmer's company has been posting (apparently free) FRC training videos at http://www.frcmastery.com/. Possibly they're worth checking out.

Answer 4

If you have LabVIEW installed you could have a look at the following two sections of the on-line help files:

1. Getting started
2. Fundamentals

The Getting started section is a technical part on how to use LabVIEW, the fundamentals on the other hand provide a deep inside in how to program with LabVIEW and covers a lot. Both elements are available on the web (I provided the URLs)

Answer 5

Personally, I'm not so into NI resources. However, they provided this short and rather nice course: http://cnx.org/content/col10241/1.4 (I like the videos).

Also, I used this http://techteach.no/labview/lv85/labview/index.htm