How did you learn LabVIEW?

[SteveChandler]

I'm curious how you learned LabVIEW. Did you learn from NI courses? In school? Taught by a co-worker? Reading the documentation? Figuring out how the pieces fit together? Every answer gets kudos.

Spoiler

Not necessarily every reply gets kudos, but every answer will

[elset191]

After I graduated with a CS degree I got a job working with LabVIEW, which I'd never heard of.  The first couple months I had an old edition of LabVIEW for Everyone by my side and spent a lot of time here.  Basically, I credit the forums as my teacher.  It was easy learning, basically just picking up the new 'syntax'.

[Darren]

I got LabVIEW Basics I/II training from a senior AE when I started as an AE at NI back in January 1999.  It was LabVIEW 5.0.1.

[TiTou]

As my signature suggests I recieved LabVIEW in my baby-bottle from dady.

More seriously, I studied thermal engineering and after my first year at university (year 2000) I worked at my father's company (Saphir) for 6 weeks, I started with the standard basic 1 & 2 that were taught in-house and my first project was to write a software to benchmark different options for writing binary data to disk (one file per channel vs all channel in the same file, use of flush, etc...). After that, each year during my studies I had internship periods to do in the industry and I amost always arranged it so that it could include thermal engineering and some LabVIEW dev (only in 2001 there was no LabVIEW involved).

I went to Madrid on a student exchange program (Erasmus) for my last semester and at the end of that I had an interview at NI in Madrid, they were ready to welcome me for a 6 month intership but for administrative reasons in the end my University didn't let me do it, so I ended up doing my final internship at Qualimatest and I've been developping LabVIEW based vision systems there for over 6 years now.

And I hope to get CLAed by th end of the year to out-rank my father 

[RobCole]

I started in school back a few years with LabVIEW 4.0. We had a project to do in LabVIEW to control a compressor. I learned the very basics of LabVIEW there.

Then I got a job where we needed to do some custom switching. There I was, programming in LV 5.0. Based on what I had learned in class and through the tutorials that shipped with LabVIEW (no internet connection yet).

A few years later, at another company, is when I really learned LabVIEW (LV 6i). I learned a LOT from the newly formed forums and even was in the top 10 posters with my 300 posts. Oh how things have changed.

Mostly - learning by doing and by forums.

Rob

[yenknip]

As I was the only LabVIEW guy at work (and still am), I am entirely self taught. I mostly learned through trial and error, translating my knowledge of other programming languages over, and imitating common design patterns of other languages.

Rather than ask questions, I tend to work problems through at my own pace - after nearly 5 years on the forum I have only started 22 threads.

[SnowMule]

Mostly self-taught. 

Place I worked through high school had an ancient copy of HP-VEE (MS-DOS, maybe windows 98).  We were building a 100-something channel AE system at the time, there was no way we were going to calibrate all these channels manually and still ship on time.  One of the other engineers wrote the VEE code, I could kinda understand what was going on but just followed what the messages on the screen said to connect test points to.

A few years later, same company... developed a gas cylinder retest system and brought in a contractor to do the LabVIEW code.  Motion control, instrument I/O, math/signal analysis... that was my first taste of what LabVIEW was really capable of doing.  Seeing that code, it made a lot more sense to me than VEE/Delphi/C but I still didn't quite grasp what all was going on behind the front panel.

Got a copy of LV7.1 in college and used that to rip through some homework problems.  Never had any formal LabVIEW education/courses, but understood enough to make things work.  It was a nice tool to have on several occasions.

Laid off from that company, small company in town was expanding and brought me on board in manufacturing.  They realized I was capable of a lot more than just turning screws, eventually we made a new "Test Engineering" group and I was brought into that to do the hardware.  Still do mostly hardware design/assembly (and associated paperwork ), but also do a fair amount of LabVIEW coding.

Learned a lot by making a lot of mistakes.  Online forums are a great resource too.

[Mark_Yedinak]

Graduated with a CS degree and spent the first 8 years or so of my career switching between real-time embedded firmware development and test automation using C and assembly. After a job switch I started focusing more on test automation and worked with another individual who was a LabVIEW advocate. Once I got a taste of it I dove in. I took all the courses, picked up books and was using it on a daily basis. From that point on I have continued to use it and it has become my primary development langauge. I occassionally work with C and C++ as well as some scripting languages but will choose LabVIEW if possible.

In addition, over the past 7 years or so I have also gotten heavily involved with the forums and the certification program. Both of these have helped me refine my LabVIEW skills significantly. Attending NI Week is also helpful not only for the sessions but the sidewalk conversations in the evenings with the who's who of LabVIEW.

[aeastet]

I learned from a co-worker or a consultant. He was very hesitant to show me what was going on at first because he thought that I would not need him any more. He is still here thirteen years later and we are doing some really cool things.

I have always thought about getting certified and taking a few courses just to see a different way of doing things. But developing my own version of things has really tough me a lot. My boss would never buy me the tool kits so I had to develop my own for everything. I have a module that talks to MS Excel and word, One for SQL one for our own version of a C++ database. A new touch screen system and all of the nice controls that go with that. I wrote my own industrial controls to talk to Allen Bradley PLC's and we also have a version for Mitsubishi. We have also written High speed camera software for Vision Research and Redlake applications Just to name a few of the reusable code we have.

[johnsold]

I learned Algol during my EE education.  Later did some programming in Pascal. In 1986 I started a new job.  The boss said we had a problem. the group had been designing hardware for various research systems and someone else was writing software, mostly in Basic.  Because no one was in overall control of these projects, the hardware and the software usually worked separately but rarely together.  So the boss asked me whether we should take on the software portion of the projects, and, if so, what programming language we should use.  We discovered LV and determined that all of the projects over the previous few years could have been done with LV (had it existed) and we projected that the projects we were likely to see in the next two or three years could also be done in LV.

So we got LV 1.2 and taught ourselves how to use it.  Our first project had a 27 or 30 frame stacked sequence structure and SCSI-based data acquisition equipment (8-bit A/D, 8-bit DO, and a function generator).  We also built a bunch of amplifiers, programmable attenuators, and digital control circuits.  It worked well to test the response of lab rats to exposure to potentially toxic chemicals by measuring their hearing via the acoustic startle response.  This system gave better results with far fewer animals and in less time than previous techniques.

I am now beginning a project to develop the fourth generation of that program.  The current version has been in regular use since 1999 studying how rabbits learn. Several Ph.D.s and refereed publications have been a direct result of research performed using it.

After a number of years of working alone on LV, I have attended user group meetings and NI seminars. NI Week and this Forum have been major factors in my development as a LV programmer.  I like Gary Johnson's book "LabVIEW Power Programming," and Conway and Watts book on "A Software Engineering Approach to LabVIEW." I am trying to learn OOP starting with Weisfeld's "The Object-Oriented Thought Process."

Lynn