LabVIEW Toolkits Overview
You can purchase several add-on software toolkits for developing specialized applications in LabVIEW. All the toolkits integrate seamlessly in LabVIEW. After you install a LabVIEW add-on such as a toolkit, module, or driver, the documentation for that add-on appears in the LabVIEW Help or appears in a separate help system you can access by selecting Help»Add-On Help, where Add-On Help is the name of the separate help system for the add-on.
The following list describes some of the signal processing and analysis tools; professional development tools to optimize, test, and distribute your VIs; third-party connectivity tools to Microsoft Office for professional reporting, databases to access and store data, and embedded design tools; and control and simulation tools you have to extend the LabVIEW programming environment. Refer to the National Instruments Web site for a complete offering of LabVIEW toolkits.
Signal Processing and Analysis
- Digital Filter Design Toolkit—Extends LabVIEW with functions and interactive design tools to rapidly explore classical designs and to design, model, and implement fixed-point and floating-point digital filters. You can design over 30 filter types—including FIR, IIR, and multirate filters—with well-known and special-purpose design options: Kaiser window, Dolph-Chebyshev, windowed, max flat, narrowband (interpolated FIR), elliptic, Chebyshev, Inverse Chebyshev, Butterworth, Bessel, notch/peak, max flat, comb, halfband multirate, single-stage multirate, n-stage multirate, Nyquist multirate, and root-raised/raised cosine multirate.
- Sound and Vibration Toolkit—Extends LabVIEW functions and indicators to handle audio measurements, fractional-octave analysis, swept sine analysis, sound-level measurements, frequency analysis, frequency response measurements, transient analysis, and several sound and vibration displays, including waterfall displays. Functionality includes scaling, calibration, limit testing, weighting, and distortion and single-tone measurements.
- Modulation Toolkit—Extends the built-in analysis capability of LabVIEW with functions and tools for signal generation, analysis, visualization, and processing of standard and custom digital and analog modulation formats. This toolkit provides quality measurements including EVM and modulation error ratio (MER); handles standard and custom modulation formats (AM, FM, PM, ASK, FSK, MSK, GMSK, PSK, QPSK, PAM, QAM, CPM); simulates and measures impairments including DC offset, IQ gain imbalance, and quadrature skew; and offers bit-error rate (BER), phase error, burst timing, and frequency deviation measurements.
- Spectral Measurements Toolkit—Extends LabVIEW with functions for acquiring and analyzing spectral measurements and performing modulation and demodulation on AM, FM, and PM signals. This toolkit includes power spectrum, peak power and frequency, in-band power, adjacent-channel power, and occupied bandwidth, as well as 3D spectrogram capabilities.
You can find more signal processing and analysis toolkits at ni.com/toolkits.
Professional Development
- Real-Time Execution Trace Toolkit—Provides real-time developers an interactive tool for analyzing and verifying the execution of code they develop with the LabVIEW Real-Time Module. You can interactively analyze and benchmark thread and VI execution; optimize performance by identifying memory allocation, sleep spans, and resource contention; and create execution traces for LabVIEW Real-Time Module applications that you can print for documentation and code reviews.
- Express VI Development Toolkit—Provides tools to help you create interactive Express VIs that simplify the development of test, measurement, and control applications. Express VIs provide an interactive, configuration-based, easy-to-use interface for your end users.
- VI Analyzer Toolkit—Pinpoints improvements you can make in the UI design, block diagram code, documentation, and VI properties and settings to optimize performance, usability, and maintainability of your VIs.
You can find more professional development, software engineering, and optimization toolkits at ni.com/toolkits.
Third-Party Connectivity Tools
- Report Generation Toolkit for Microsoft Office—Provides a library of VIs for programmatically creating and editing Microsoft Word and Excel reports from LabVIEW.
- Database Connectivity Toolkit—Offers tools with which you can quickly connect to local and remote databases in which you store data and perform common database operations without having to perform structured query language (SQL) programming. This toolkit connects to the most popular databases through Microsoft ADO technology and readily connects to Microsoft Access, SQL Server, and Oracle databases.
- Math Interface Toolkit—Integrates LabVIEW VIs into The MathWorks, Inc. MATLAB® software environment, providing a better means of collaboration for development teams working in both LabVIEW and the MATLAB software. This toolkit converts LabVIEW VIs to native MATLAB MEX functions and allows you to easily distribute LabVIEW applications for native use in the MATLAB analysis environment.
- Simulation Interface Toolkit—Gives design and test engineers a link between LabVIEW and The MathWorks, Inc. Simulink® and Real-Time Workshop® software to develop, prototype, and test dynamic systems using models developed in the Simulink simulation environment. You can create custom LabVIEW user interfaces using LabVIEW controls and indicators to interactively verify models you created in the Simulink environment. In addition, the LabVIEW Simulation Interface Toolkit provides a plug-in to Real-Time Workshop to import your models created in the Simulink environment into LabVIEW for deployment on real-time hardware platforms for hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and other tests while making use of supported National Instruments FPGA, DAQ, and CAN devices for real-time model I/O.
You can find more data management and visualization, embedded system development and deployment, and automated test toolkits at ni.com/toolkits.
Control Design and Simulation Tools
- Control Design Toolkit—Provides a library of VIs and LabVIEW MathScript functions that you use to design, analyze, and deploy a controller for a linear time-invariant dynamic system model. This toolkit includes frequency response analysis tools such as Bode, Nyquist, and Nichols plots; time response analysis tools such as step and impulse response analysis; classical design tools such as Root Locus; and state-feedback design tools such as Linear Quadratic Regulators and pole placement.
In addition, the Control Design Toolkit supports PID design, lead-lag compensators, predictive and continuous observers, and recursive Kalman filters for stochastic system models that incorporate measurement and process noise. You can also use the Control Design Toolkit and the LabVIEW Real-Time Module to deploy a discrete controller to a real-time target. - PID Control Toolkit—Offers PID and fuzzy logic control functions that you can combine with the math and logic functions already in LabVIEW to graphically develop control algorithms and programs for automated control.
- Simulation Module—Provides VIs, functions, and other tools that you use to construct and simulate all or part of a dynamic system model. This module supports both nonlinear and linear dynamic system models and includes tools for trimming and linearizing nonlinear models. The LabVIEW Simulation Module includes functions for describing continuous and discrete transfer function, zero-pole-gain, and state-space models as well as nonlinear phenomena such as friction, deadband, and backlash.
You can interact with a model by using any of the VIs and functions included with LabVIEW itself. You also can use the Simulation Module and the LabVIEW Real-Time Module to deploy a continuous or discrete model to a real-time target. - Statechart Module—Assists in large-scale application development by providing a framework in which you can build, debug, and deploy statecharts in LabVIEW. With the LabVIEW Statechart Module, you can create a statechart that reflects a complex decision-making algorithm. Then, you can generate the block diagram code necessary to call the statechart from a VI.
The Statechart Module supports hierarchy, concurrency and an event-based paradigm. If you install the appropriate LabVIEW module, you can execute statecharts on supported real-time targets and National Instruments FPGA devices. - System Identification Toolkit—Combines data acquisition tools with system identification algorithms for accurate plant modeling. Use the LabVIEW System Identification Toolkit with National Instruments hardware, such as NI DAQ devices, to stimulate and acquire data from a plant and then identify a dynamic system model. This toolkit provides VIs that support parametric, nonparametric, partially-known, and recursive model estimation methods; AR, ARX, ARMAX, output-error, Box-Jenkins, transfer function, zero-pole-gain, and state-space model forms; and Bode, Nyquist, and pole-zero analysis. This toolkit also includes VIs for data preprocessing and model validation.
You can find more control design, simulation, and industrial control toolkits at ni.com/toolkits.