I have always had a place for LabVIEW in my toolbox. My opinion of it varies from week to week but I am settling on the side of appreciating what it brings to the table. It is an intriguing software package that allows you to write programs using graphical block diagrams. It is targeted primarily for scientists and engineers (read: non-programmers). I am a seasoned programmer with experience in C, C#, Java and a whole pile of other languages so it is fun for me to use LabVIEW and think about it as if I am using C. I taught myself LabVIEW over the past year by working on increasingly complex projects.
I recently got my hands on a National Instruments USB-6009 Data Acquisition (DAQ) card and decided to write up a driver for the classic Hitachi HD44780 LCD controller. I used the object oriented features of LabVIEW to implement the driver. This allows multiple instances of the LCD to exist concurrently which means that I can have multiple displays interfaced to my PC simultaneously. The results were great!
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| The Initialized and Functional Display :] |
I I released the
code on NI Developer Zone. Read on to see how I did it!
