I wired two buttons connecting an Arduino’s pins 7 and 8 to ground, each with a 10K pull-up resistor. Checking the Active box on the pin editor makes the pin show up on the Firmata component You can set the serial port to use and the refresh interval for inputs (apparently in milliseconds). First, you really need your board hooked up and working before you put the block down as it reads things even before you run your virtual machine. The Firmata block ( Firmata is a protocol for communicating with microcontroller boards) is used to represent the hardware interface of your project and has a few interesting properties. You also have the power to add logic to existing hardware inputs. The diagram is where you specify connections between your virtual front panel and actual hardware you want to control. The Jolly Wrencher is just a graphic added for decoration along the other items and labels that make the front panel look nice but don’t show up in the working diagram. There are also plenty of substantial examples already in the VirtualMachines folder you can examine. They can stand alone, but the power comes in being able to connect to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi (or a few other options) for I/O.īefore getting into the gritty detials, let’s look at a simple demo I cooked up to try things out. You can connect all the little boxes together to build up applications. But some things live on both like switches, LEDs, graphs, and so on.

Some things only live on the diagram, like a timer or a connection to an Arduino. In myOpenLab your device will consist of two parts: a diagram and a front panel. You build virtual device (they call it a “VirtualMachine”) that uses your computer as the control panel and readout, and your electronic project as the physical interface. I took the plunge and found the language barrier didn’t cause me trouble.Īs an example of what you can do, image you want to build a custom bench tool. The website and documentation are not in English, which may have kept some people from giving it a try, but the software itself is available in German, English, and Spanish. The open source MyOpenLab project has been around for a while. Not so much modern LabView with all of its add-ons and extras, but LabView back when it did just a few things but did them really well.

If you want controls and readouts for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Android, or anything with a serial port, this is worth a try. If you want to integrate a nice graphical interface with a microcontroller or single-board computer for a useful piece of custom equipment, how will you go about it? MyOpenLab is a platform that makes it easy to design virtual interfaces your electronic builds.

Labview interface for arduino download