How did you learn LabVIEW?

[Freelance_LV]

Well!

I had given my story somewhere in the forums before. Trying to locate it.

Anyways....

I was given LabVIEW Basics 1 and 2, LabVIEW Intermediate manuals (Real huge books!) and a PC with LV 8.0 installed. This was on the second day of my first job.

I was given 30 days to train myself and then develop a small project.

It was fun! We were a group of 7 people, had daily evening sessions to review what we learnt, if we had doubts etc. A senior in the office would be present in the discussion, to answer ONLY if none of us 7 had answers to our doubts.

I remember the demo project! I had used 2/3rds of all the colors available in the Tool box. Green background, maroon and purple buttons, something was in yellow, etc etc

I never wrote a 'neat n clean' block diagram till i started preparing for CLD. I never understood the need for it. I thought my boss was too bossy!!

 After CLD, i cannot think of writing code without documentation, wires not aligned, etc etc.

[PaulG.]

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@Freelance LV wrote:

I remember the demo project! I had used 2/3rds of all the colors available in the Tool box. Green background, maroon and purple buttons, something was in yellow, etc etc

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You and I would have had some issues. 

[Jeff-P]

I started using LabVIEW 7 in 2006 at my first internship in my first year of college when my boss told me they wanted to automate some test stations using a language called LabVIEW which no one at the company knew how to use and which I had never heard of. I read some tutorials and started trying to make things happen. After beating my head against the wall for a while trying to find where the variables and pointers were hiding, I eventually got the hang of it and finished up the systems (I cringe now when I think of that code). I spent a lot of time on the forums then, with a different username, but it was the best tool available to me for learning LabVIEW. I tried to answer the simple posts and read through a ton of other threads to learn how to solve more complex problems. After that internship I stopped working with LabVIEW since my college did not use it.

Eventually I ended up coming to work for NI, so now I use LabVIEW all the time

[rolfk]

In engineering college I had learned programming in Pascal and Modula, the at that time popular teaching languages especially in Switzerland where the father of Pascal and Modula comes from. Then in 1992 I started as AE at NI Switzerland and had the opportunity to go to the headquarter in Austin for 4 months for learning everything about supporting NI products. When I saw LabVIEW during my interview for the job I was somewhat surprised and doubted its effectiveness a bit, but after having played half an hour with it I was hooked. This was programming as I always had hoped to do it, without the hassle of complex syntax, repeated compile - fix syntax error - compile again cycles that took a long time each time. The graphical diagram also came naturally to me, feeling very similar to electrical schemata as we had learned them in electronics. And having build quite a few electronic circuits of my own during college, I really loved electronic design.

While those 4 months in Austin were mostly dedicated to learning GPIB, GPIB, DAQ, GPIB, LabWindows, GPIB and a little Visual Basic, I also had the chance to attend a LabVIEW Basic course which accelerated my LabVIEW skills dramatically. After that I did the other LabVIEW courses self paced since there wasn't any time left to fit in more classes into the schedule.

I really loved my Mac IIci that I got back then and which made the travel back over the ocean to serve as my main desktop for the entire duration of my work at NI Switzerland and which saw many LabVIEW diagrams.

Coincidentially I did learn real C after I had gotten proficient in LabVIEW, trying to write CINs to do the at that time sometimes impossible in LabVIEW, and also to be able to support LabWindows CVI, which was released later. (LabWindows for DOS did support a C dialect of sorts, but that was limited to things that could be directly translated to the Basic dialect it also supported, so no real pointers and such basic C elements).

[Jon_Z]

I was in a entrepreneurship promoting center in 2002, trying to set up an startup for embedded system development. We solved a problem for a company using C and an embedded microcontroller and some time later they called me to work as a contractor developing in Labview, although I had no idea in G programming. I only had 2 weeks to learn because their only Labview engineer was leaving the company.

  From that first contact I liked Labview and learnt from many examples and documents on NI website. We added Labview programming to the services offered by our company and nowadays it accounts for 50% of sales.

  I passed the CLAD exam three years ago but I did not renove it. Seriously thinking of getting CLAD and CLD before next year, I have been working with an engineer who passed CLD and learnt many things from him I would not learn by self-teaching.

 Jon Aramendia

 Zermik Ingeniería

[Baturin]

Before I met LabVIEW I have heard that it is some kind of a system which can be used to buil measurement system, nothing more specific. We had no LabVIEW in our University at that time. Most of the measurement systems that I have used were still in DOS.

During my 1st year of PhD study (2003) I was in 2 month visit in Darmstadt TU, Germany (that was my first scientific visit to other countries). Computers in the lab had LabVIEW (I think it was 6.0) installed and I was curious to look what is it during spare time. There were also some pieces of equipment with GPIB interfaces around. Most of the lab students and staff didn't know how to use LabVIEW as well (and what is a reason to use it) :).

So, I have looked for LabVIEW itself, checked some examples and tried to communicate with HP multimeter, which driver is the default one in instr.lib. Imediately I had encounterd the problem with regional settings for floating point :).

Closer to the end of my visit I have started to build new setup based on LabVIEW with the use of SR830 lock-in amplifier and couple of other instruments (some kind of generator and programmable ac source).  Just during the last saturday, one day before I leave Germany I have completed the setup and obtained first resuls :). This was a great success. After half a year we had published a couple of highly cited (years after) publications in Appl. Phys. Lett. and Acta Materailia in which most of the results were obtained on exactly this setup.That is why I become a great fan of LabIVEW.

Most knowlege I have gained from examples, something from help system and a lot (really a lot) were clear by intuition.

For sure, now we have and extensively use University LabVIEW license and a lot of compartible hardware.

[Jack K]

I was a simple lab rat working alongside our test engineer building a project in 2001 - I was doing the physical build and he was doing the LabVIEW programming using version 4.  He abruptly resigned one Wednesday morning and I was tasked with finishing the project on my own.  I had only seen a few block diagrams and never edited one so I was given a copy of LabVIEW Graphical Programming to figure things out.  We ended up behind schedule by only a few days and the system is still working fine though we did upgrade it to version 5.0 after a while.

A short while after that we got a new project to work on and I got to go to the LabVIEW Beginner course where we used version 6!  When I finished that up my company upgraded to that version and bought me a new book to learn from (LabVIEW for Everyone) and I was the new test engineer.

I am mainly self taught but I write that with the qualification that I have learned many, many things from these boards and LAVA.  I can almost always find a simpler or more efficient way to do something from one of those places.

[Cory_K]

Back in 2007, I was doing undergrad research for the first time. I was a freshman at the time

I had some knowledge of programming, but not LabVIEW specifically.

My advisor had some equipment that she needed to interface with the computer and heard other professors mentioning how they had a student or two use LabVIEW to do something similar. She asked me to learn enough LabVIEW to get the equipment working.

After fidgeting around with it for a few hours, I got the gist of it and loved the idea of a graphical programming language.

I started using it for more complicated and involved programs, which eventually brought me to the forums.

From there I saw applications that opened my eyes to how versitile and robust the language was, and learned a ton of information from all the forum legends. From that point, I got addicted and wanted to learn more and more. 5 years later, I am in my 2nd year of grad school using a ton of LabVIEW for my experiments.

It's been great and I've loved every minute of it.

[P@Anand]

In my case I started learning LabVIEW in my Masters and at that time I started with forum (you can see here how I was) then after coming to work I started to use forum regularly and most of my LabVIEW knowledge came from forum and some of my friends.

[William_Wood]

When a branch asked for help (just for 4 months) on the work of Omni-directional camera for the rover to help it to identify the surrounding area to self-localize itself without aid of GPS, I quickly applied only to find out that it uses LabVIEW language that I never heard of (3 years ago) but that didn't stop me from taking that project. They gave me LabVIEW Basics I/II to self-taught myself in just 2 weeks then I was able to complete the project within 4 months. I fell in love with LabVIEW and been using it ever since in other projects. I had been taking some courses to improve my skills even more.