I was invited to talk at the recent NI Days conference in London about the experiments we've been doing around hooking mbed up to LabView. The talk is a backgrounder and some basic demos of how to get them talking, and I was joined by Ian Bell from NI to show how you can even target microcontrollers directly from LabView. The talk was videoed, so here it is for anyone interested in LabView and mbed working together...

• NIDays 2010: Rapid Prototyping using ARM Mbed Microcontrollers and LabVIEW

Since I submitted the talk, Michael Walker did some great work plumbing in LabView to the mbed RPC interfaces, so you can now use directly objects in LabView to represent C++ objects in mbed, in a similar way to the native NI DAQmx interfaces.

Here is an example of creating and using a DigitalOut directly LabView. Note that the code on the mbed is just a common serial RPC binary, so this requires no coding on the mbed side:

And by switching the RPC handler, you can swap over to a different transport mechanism such as Ethernet/HTTP:

Hopefully this should make it very quick to start getting them interacting. For all the information and resources we have so far for hooking up LabView to mbed, see:

• http://mbed.org/cookbook/Interfacing-with-LabVIEW

It is only a start, and we're not LabView experts, so if anyone has ideas of ways to improve and extend this interface, please jump in to the cookbook!