The Caliper

Do-it-Yourself Programming with LabPro

in LabVIEW ™ , Visual BASIC ® or REALbasic ®

Over the years, we have always supported and encouraged people who enjoy programming to use our lab interfaces for custom programming. We have recently completed sample programs to help you program for LabPro using three very different environments:

• LabVIEW—a graphical programming language used extensively in research and industry. A sample program for LabVIEW is called a virtual instrument, or VI.
• Visual BASIC—the most popular programming language for Windows.
• REALbasic—a language very similar to Visual Basic, but for Macintosh.

The sample programs will help you get started in writing your own programs for collecting and analyzing LabPro data. For each programming language, the samples include the following types of data collection:

• slow analog (real time)
• fast analog (non-real time)
• Motion Detector
• Photogate
• other digital inputs

In addition, we have samples showing digital output (for use with the DCU, for example) and analog output (-5 to +5 V). These sample programs and VIs are available free on our web site at www.vernier.com. Click on the “Downloads” button. Also available on our web site is the LabPro Technical Reference Manual with all the details of how LabPro is controlled by programs.