Extremely New to LabView Need Basic Help

[hashirahmed]

Hello,

I have never used LabVIEW before and it seems like a very complex application that requires a lot of practice before actual use. The tutorials are pretty difficult to understand without the actual program before you. I have a proposal due tomorrow and I need some basic information. I know that you can graph a pulse signal from a PIC by setting up a serial port and then sending an array to a graph block. What I need to know is how can I measure the amount of pulses in 60 seconds, using either the graph or the array? Is there a block that does this? The input signal will be a pulse representing heart beats.

Thanks

[cbutcher · Accepted solution]

What sort of pulses are you seeing? It's some sort of spike for each heart beat with a nice low value output in between spikes?

If you have a well defined high and low transition, you can consider using the 'Pulse Measurements VI' found in the 'Signal Processing > Wfm Measure' palette.

An example using this VI is the 'Pulse and Transition Measurements' example packaged with LabVIEW. The Pulse Measurements VI is in case 1, but the other cases might also be helpful for your understanding of these (sub)VIs.

If you wanted a more crude but simple to understand methodology, you could use a For loop with your array input and use a shift register to keep a count of each time you crossed some mid-level value (please note, I wouldn't suggest this approach - you'll need to be quite careful regarding oscillations near the setpoint, and so on).

[hashirahmed]

This is pretty much all I needed cause I can modify the signal prior to sending it to LabVIEW which might let me use that block. Regardless it gives me some proposal which is what I needed. 

Thank you

[billko]

I'm just curious how you do a proposal about something you know nothing about...?  😉

[Hooovahh · Accepted solution]

LabVIEW is a programming language.  So if you are asking the question "Can LabVIEW do this?" first ask the general question "Can software do this?" if the answer is yes, to the second question it is (almost) always yes to the second question.  There are of course limitations with deploying some software to targets LabVIEW doesn't support, but for the most part if you can put down pseudo code that does what you want, LabVIEW can do it.

[hashirahmed]

We were asked to "proactively learn LabVIEW" but my knowledge is very basic at the moment about the application. I've never used it before but I have skimmed through the tutorial PDF and some YouTube videos. 

[billko]

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@hashirahmed wrote:

We were asked to "proactively learn LabVIEW" but my knowledge is very basic at the moment about the application. I've never used it before but I have skimmed through the tutorial PDF and some YouTube videos. 

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That is a tall order, and due to something that always irritated me about National Instruments and how they promote LabVIEW as being "so easy to learn that an engineer can use it!"  Well, my answer to that is that anyone can easily learn how to do anything badly.  The hard part is to do it well.  As you have concluded from the tutorials, it's just as complicated to do something correctly in LabVIEW as it is in any other programming language - but I must they that there are many more ways to do something badly in LabVIEW because you can do several bad things at the same time.

Honestly, the best thing you can do right now is take the tutorials and ask lots of questions here.  And do what I still do today.  Browse the forum and read stuff that you think is interesting.  Just yesterday I learned an entirely different method of doing something I've been doing for years.  I wouldn't call one way "better" than the other, but I could see implementing it in the future so I no longer have to use a screwdriver as a chisel.

[Mancho00]

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@billko wrote:

I'm just curious how you do a proposal about something you know nothing about...?  😉

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You've obviously never been a government contractor.