LabVIEW and Connectivity with Third-Party Math Packages
Easily interconnect with a variety of design tools, including math packages, with the open connectivity of LabVIEW. The wide set of measurement analysis functions in LabVIEW provides great functionality, but sometimes your measurements need validation against designs built in third-party packages. Design validation is easier and faster by sharing data between theoretical models and your measurement applications. Enhance your measurement applications by taking advantage of symbolic mathematical operations or save time by re-using previously created algorithms.
A number of resources are available for connecting LabVIEW and specific mathematical modeling and computational packages. If you cannot find the resources that you need below, please e-mail info@ni.com to make a suggestion or ask a question.
Specific Math Packages
Methods of Integrating with Third-Party Math Packages
Interconnecting LabVIEW with these design tools can take several forms. Several general approaches are described below.
File I/O
LabVIEW communicates with math packages in a variety of ways. The simplest way is via file I/O. LabVIEW is a flexible engineering tool with the ability to read and write data in a wide variety of formats. Simply saving data to a spreadsheet file or other format can sometimes sufficiently serve your needs. However, some file formats are proprietary, and it may prove difficult to read and write files for both LabVIEW and your math package. This scheme also does not really provide interactivity between the two applications.
DLLs
Fortunately, LabVIEW has the ability to use several means of application interactivity. The first are shared libraries, or DLLs. Build any LabVIEW application into a DLL, and subsequently call it from other applications. Likewise, LabVIEW can call DLLs built from any language or application. Several math tools have some capacity to call DLLs, though none can build them.
ActiveX
Another method is ActiveX, an application-to-application communication standard produced by Microsoft. ActiveX uses a client-server architecture with which an application can call other applications via a vendor defined API. LabVIEW applications can play both roles - either as an ActiveX server or as a client. This means in real time, LabVIEW can cause a math package and its files to open or close, processes or scripts to run, or data to be sent or received. Likewise, a math package that can call an ActiveX server can open a LabVIEW application, run it, and get any data that it may acquire.
