Larsen Ronald. LabVIEW for Engineer

Pearson Education, 2011. — 406 p.Based on the most current release of LabVIEW, LabVIEW for Engineers is designed for readers with little to no experience using LabVIEW.In the past, LabVIEW was just a graphical programming language that was developed to make it easier to collect data from laboratory instruments using data acquisition systems. LabVIEW was always easy to use once you got used to wiring connectors to write your computer programs, and it definitely makes data acquisition an easier task than without LabVIEW, but LabVIEW is not just for data acquisition any more.
LabVIEW can be used to perform the following:
acquire data from instruments
process data (e.g., filtering, transforms)
analyze data
control instruments and equipment
For engineers, LabVIEW makes it possible to bring information from the outside world into a computer, make decisions based on the acquired data, and send computed results back into the world to control the way a piece of equipment operates.
As an example, the LabVIEW program (front panel) shown in Figure 1.1 reads a process measurement (a temperature value) from a piece of equipment, compares the measured process temperature with the desired temperature (called a setpoint), and outputs a signal to a controller to try to control the temperature at the setpoint value. You can see in Figure 1.1 that when the temperature went above setpoint, the controller output decreased. This causes a valve on a heat source to close (partially) to bring the temperature back to setpoint.