Virtual instrumentation

                    ABSTRACT
Introduction:
Virtual instrumentation:
Virtual Instrumentation is the use of customizable software and modular measurement hardware to create user-defined measurement systems, called virtual instruments. The concept of a synthetic instrument is a subset of the virtual instrument concept. A synthetic instrument is a kind of virtual instrument that is purely software defined. A synthetic instrument performs a specific synthesis, analysis, or measurement function on completely generic, measurement agnostic hardware. Virtual instruments can still have measurement specific hardware, and tend to emphasize modular hardware approaches that facilitate this specificity. Hardware supporting synthetic instruments is by definition not specific to the measurement, nor is it necessarily (or usually) modular. Leveraging commercially available technologies, such as the PC and the analog to digital converter, virtual instrumentation has grown significantly since its inception in the late 1970s. Additionally, software packages like National Instruments' Lab VIEW and other graphical programming languages helped grow adoption by making it easier for non-programmers to develop systems. Lab VIEW: Lab VIEW (short for Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench) is a platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments. Originally released for the Apple Macintosh in 1986, Lab VIEW is commonly used for data acquisition, instrument control, and industrial automation on a variety of platforms including Microsoft Windows, various flavors of UNIX, Linux, and Mac OS.The programming language used in Lab VIEW, is a dataflow language. Execution is determined by the structure of a graphical block diagram

Lab VIEW
(short for Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench) is a platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments. Since this might be the case for multiple nodes simultaneously, it is inherently capable of parallel execution. Furthermore, Lab VIEW does not require type definition of the variables; the wire type is defined by the data-supplying node.   Communication systems:                          Starting from the easiest of the communication techniques and systems we move towards the most complicated and explore the use of virtual instrumentation and lab VIEW and its scope in creating a close simulation of these systems. The techniques covered begin from normal frequency translation to amplitude modulation leading to pulse modulation and finally culminates in the simulation of tougher topics like that of time and frequency division multiplexing and amplitude shift keying.   Experimental work   Lab VIEW ties the creation of user interfaces (called front panels) into the development cycle. Lab VIEW programs/subroutines are called virtual instruments (VIs). Each VI has three components:   Block diagram  Connector pane  Front panel      However, the front panel can also serve as a programmatic interface. This implies each VI can be easily tested before being embedded as a subroutine into a larger program                                                                     The graphical approach also allows non-programmers to build programs by simply dragging and dropping virtual representations of the lab equipment with which they are already familiar. The Lab VIEW programming environment, with the included examples and the documentation, makes it simpler to create small applications. This is a benefit on one side but there is also a certain danger of underestimating the expertise needed for good quality programming