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LabVIEW and Arduino Play Together

Steve.J
Active Participant

If any of you have been involved in hobby electronics, the maker movement, or student design projects, you have probably heard about "Arduino" (arr-dwee-noh) - the small, low-cost embedded microcontroller board.  Since it's launch in 2005, the Arduino community has grown rapidly, with add-on boards and numerous discussion forums, blogs, and neat projects being posted on-line almost every day.  For those of you who haven't come across it, Arduino is an open-source "physical computing" prototyping platform consisting of very small, low-cost and low-power microcontroller boards with a small amount of integrated I/O.  It is supported with a free, simple set of tools for configuration and programming. Intended for hobbyists and non-embedded experts, it has caught on rapidly and is now supported by a growing ecosystem of add-on products and on-line communities.

The Arduino board doesn't have much to offer in the way of a user interface, so a group of guys at NI thought that it would be cool to be able to interface LabVIEW with an Arduino project, and do it in a way that is easy and inexpensive in keeping with the Arduino philosophy.  Check out what they've come up with here:  https://decibel.ni.com/content/groups/labview-interface-for-arduino

The free LabVIEW Interface for Arduino toolkit has been so popular that we have partnered with Sparkfun Electronics to create a complete kit of an Arduino Uno board with the LabVIEW Student Edition all for under $50. 

So what kinds of biomedical applications could you do with an Arduino Uno and LabVIEW?  How about an activity monitor for a pet gerbil or hamster that you could use to monitor periods of sleep, activity, feeding, and maybe even provide alerts for low water or food.  Or a pulse rate monitor with data logging using a photoplethysmograph (PPG) sensor utilizing an IR LED and photodetector.  If you have had the chance to work with an Arduino, let us know about your project - we'd love to hear about it!

Steve