LabVIEW and Arduino Play Together

[Steve.J]

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