LabVIEW Design Patterns

Thomas Bress
University of Michigan

Publication Date: TBD
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
ISBN 13: 978-1-934891-08-7
ISBN 10: 1-934891-08-8
Page Count: TBD

The goal of this book is to teach people how to think in LabVIEW. It is an indispensable resource for those who know some LabVIEW basics but want to learn how to increase their productivity and reduce development time and effort by using established LabVIEW design patterns. The focus of the presentation is on learning how to create LabVIEW code that is readable, scalable and maintainable. The core of the book is a structured series of examples of code with the same functionality but increasing degrees of readability, scalability and maintainability. These examples are based on a Car Wash example adapted from the Certified LabVIEW Developer Exam found on the National Instruments website.  Working through detailed examples and testing comprehension with end of chapter exercises will allow the reader to become skilled with visualizing and implementing standard LabVIEW design patterns. The examples are presented in the following order:

1.        Spaghetti code: a typical “beginner’s” version with sequence structures and local variables
2.        Classic state machine
3.        Event-driven state machine
4.        Queued event-driven state machine
5.        State machine with arguments
6.        String-based state machine
7.        Object-oriented state machine
8.        Producer-Consumer