LabVIEW Community Edition — The Complete Guide: Graphical Programming for Measurement and Control in Personal Projects
LabVIEW Community Edition from NI is a graphical programming environment: you build software from blocks and wires instead of lines of code. It is used to acquire data from sensors, control measurement instruments, run automated tests and build control interfaces.
LabVIEW Community Edition
NI
Graphical programming for data acquisition, instrument control and Arduino or Raspberry Pi projects — free for personal non-commercial projects.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- All LabVIEW Professional capabilities — according to NI, the edition includes everything in the professional version.
- Dataflow programming — a graphical diagram that is easy to follow.
- LINX — working with Arduino, Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoard.
- G Web Development — building browser-based interfaces.
- Measurement and control — data acquisition and instrument control.
Who may use it for free
The licence covers personal non-commercial projects only. It may not be used for paid work or inside a company, and it is not meant for academic institutions either — universities and vocational schools, researchers and teachers need an academic licence. Activation requires an NI account, and the licence is renewed through that account.
Related tools
For free PLC programming to the IEC 61131-3 standard — OpenPLC. For firmware on Arduino boards — Arduino IDE. For open-source block-diagram modelling — Scilab with Xcos.
OpenPLC
Autonomy Logic
Open IEC 61131-3 PLC editor and runtime — ladder, FBD and ST, with a built-in simulator and deployment to Raspberry Pi and Arduino.
Get it from the vendor
Arduino IDE
Arduino
The official IDE for Arduino boards — write code, upload it to the board and watch sensors on the serial monitor.
Get it from the vendor
Scilab
Dassault Systèmes / Scilab Enterprises
Numerical computing with Xcos — block-diagram simulation of dynamic systems alongside scripting.
Get it from the vendor
PulseView
sigrok project
A GUI for cheap and professional logic analysers and oscilloscopes, with protocol decoders such as I2C, SPI, UART and CAN.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
For a personal project, self-study or a hobby, this is an excellent way to get the full LabVIEW for free. Commercial or academic work needs a different licence.