LabVIEW Installation for a University Hands-On Event

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This page has the instructions students need to setup and use LabVIEW on their personal computers for a University Hands-On Event. To complete all the exercises, students will need LabVIEW, DAQ, and VISA installed on their machine, per the instructions below. VI Package Manager is also recommended in order to enable access to common libraries for additional functionality.

Checklist

Please ensure you have the following items on your machine setup and activated:

Software Description
LabVIEW Community Edition (CE) This is required for all exercises and installs the development environment that will be used for programming. LabVIEW CE must be installed before installing any of the other components
DAQmx This is required to interact with NI Data Acquisition cards. It is primarily for Windows and Linux and has limited support on macOS. Specific exercises that require advanced DAQ functionality will not be compatible with Mac, but can instead use VISA drivers for instrumentation connectivity.
VISA This driver provides connectivity with most leading instrumentation, such as DMMs, Scopes, Function Generators, Power Supplies, etc.. as well as RS-232 communication for serial connectivity. It is compatible with all LabVIEW versions, but there are specific steps to ensure proper operation on macOS
VI Package Manager This is an optional software package that provides access to additional free libraries and capabilities. It is installed by default on Windows but requires additional installation and setup steps on Mac and Linux.

LabVIEW Community Edition (CE)

LabVIEW CE is completely free for students and hobbyists when used for non-commercial applications. LabVIEW Community has all the same features and capabilities as LabVIEW Professional and supports the same drivers, add-ons and toolkits as any other version.

Windows and Linux

  • Start here: Download link
  • Select Operating System from the Supported OS drop-down menu
  • Select the latest version from the Version drop down
  • Select Community from the Included Editions drop down
  • You will need an ni.com to download and activate the CE version of LabVIEW

Note: The Linux version of LabVIEW CE requires an internet connection at all times

macOS

Native macOS versions for Apple

  • LabVIEW 2023 Q3 is the latest version of LabVIEW that provides native macOS support. It is compatible on both Intel and ARM-based Apple devices. It can be downloaded from the same page as Windows and Linux versions by selecting Mac OS in the drop down.

Emulation Options

  • It may be necessary to run LabVIEW on macOS using Rosetta to ensure the compatibility of certain drivers. This enables software to use the Intel-based instruction set. To enable this, right click on the LabVIEW application and select 'Get Info' and select 'Open using Rosetta.' Note that LabVIEW source files are unchanged when moving between versions.
  • The latest Windows and Linux versions of LabVIEW can be used in emulation environments such as VirtualBox, VMWare and Parallels. Support for the use of these environments may be limited on newer ARM-based Apple devices such as those that use the M1 and M2 chipsets.

DAQ Drivers

Unversity Hands-On events will typically use Data Acquisition (DAQ) hardware to interface with sensors and measurement devices. This driver will enable support for all NI DAQ devices, which can be found here NI DAQ equipment

Windows and Linux

Note that the full DAQmx driver is only available for Windows and Linux

Download Link

macOS

Limited device support is available for macOS using the DAQmx Base driver, which can be downloaded from here: Download Link

VISA Drivers

This is the standard driver to interface with bench top instrumentation, such as Scopes, Power Supplies, Function Generators, etc.. It also provides support for serial devices using RS-232

Download Link

It is fully supported on all versions of LabVIEW for Windows, Linux and macOS.

Additional Configuration for macOS

To ensure proper VISA functionality on a native installation of LabVIEW for macOS, LabVIEW should be run using Rosetta. To enable this, right-click on the LabVIEW application, select 'Get Info,' and select 'Open with Rosetta'

VI Package Manager

This is the 'App Store' for all LabVIEW add-ons and toolkits, the full library of which can be found on VIPM.io

Windows

  • VI Package Manager is included with the installation of LabVIEW for Windows

Linux

  • VI Package Manager for Linux is available for download from JKI's website: JKI

Mac

  • VI Package Manager for macOS is available for download from JKI's website: JKI. Note that it will not function after installation because it does not have the necessary permissions to write files to disk.
  • To fix this, run the following command from the terminal:

find "/Applications/National Instruments/LabVIEW 2024 64-bit" -type d -print0 | sudo xargs -0 echo chmod o+w

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