Let’s Talk About LabVIEW Units, Part 1
First, let’s start with a poll…
Loading ...I’m a fan of Units in LabVIEW, but I totally understand that I’m in the minority. I’m writing this blog post to perhaps persuade at least a few of you to give them a try.
What are they?
A “Unit” in LabVIEW is a label you can add to floating point numbers to tell it what physical quantity the number represents.
For example, I can assign the unit “degC” to a front panel control, to denote that the value is Degrees Celsius. Similarly, “degF” is Degrees Fahrenheit. If I wire a control representing degC to an indicator representing degF, when the VI runs, it automatically converts the value for me. I don’t have to remember F = C * 9 / 5 + 32.
LabVIEW knows about lots of physical units, using the International System of Units (SI). It also knows about prefixes like “milli”, “centi”, “kilo”, etc. If you’d like to explore them, you can right click on a unit label, and select “Build Unit String”.
This brings up a dialog to help you create a valid unit string.
Note that you can do arithmetic on units. For example, I can represent velocity as “m/s” (meters per second), or “mi/h” (miles per hour), or “cm/ms” (centimeters per millisecond).
Similarly, I could have exponents on units, such as m/s^2 to represent acceleration in meters per seconds squared.
In the example above, I hardcoded the unit as m/s, but I could also have taken a control of unit “meters” and divided it by a control of unit “seconds”, and produced a result that was velocity:
Many of the builtin LabVIEW functions understand units. The unit is part of the LabVIEW data type, which also means that LabVIEW will make sure that any arithmetic you do on units is valid. For example, I can’t add meters and seconds, because they are different base SI units (length vs. time).
Note that you can change the units on the front panel while a VI is running, as long as you enter a compatible unit. For example, in the VI above, I could change “m/s” to any velocity unit (such as “km/d” for kilometers per day) at runtime. Because the unit is part of the data type, you can’t change to an incompatible unit (e.g., change velocity to length) unless the VI is editable.
We’ve seen one rough edge to units so far: almost nobody writes “miles per hour” as “mi/h”. It’s more accepted in the USA to write “mph”. Or what if I wanted to be more verbose, and say “miles/hour”? Well, too bad. The LabVIEW Unit system doesn’t support that. There’s a long list of feature requests for making LabVIEW Units better and more customizable.
By the way, most of the decision makers about NXG saw no value in LabVIEW Units (because they didn’t use LabVIEW for much real-world work), so I think the plan was that NXG would never support Units. That made me sad. But fortunately, that resolved itself when NXG was retired.
How do Units work?
Under the hood, the system uses the base SI units. There are seven base SI units:
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