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Programming Environment:
I have been interested in National Instruments LabVIEW since
1987. It does in software what LEGO does with mechanical systems: Provides a
simplistic 'building-block' environment where a program can be built by connecting icons
together. But make no mistake... it is fully featured and powerful. For
example, it was used for data-logging on the Mars Pathfinder.
This software product, ROBOLAB, is a reduced instruction-set
version of LabVIEW.
What you see below is a collection of icons, representing
motors, rotation sensors, timers, modifiers, variables and commands of various sorts, in
order of their execution, joined by virtual wiring.
Features:
 | You can create a program by simply arranging the icons and
joining them with 'wire'. After that has been done, the program is ready to
use. There is no front-end work, such as declaration of variables and constants that
you might have in command-line programming. What you see is... the final product. |
| And... the final product is very compact. The program
below would probably take four pages of code in NQC, the version of 'C' used in The Lego
Spooler, elsewhere on this site. Because it is compact you can see the entire
program on one screen. |
| To make it even more compact, sections of the program that might
be used over and over again (subroutines) can be converted to single icons. |
| There is excellent de-bugging built into the program. |
| There is excellent context-sensitive 'help' for every icon. |
| LabVIEW, created well before LEGO Robotics, is in the spirit of
LEGO, of rapid prototyping, of cut-and-try. |
Go to Assembly
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