Hooking up LabVIEW and a Raspberry Pi

The Digilent Inc. subsidiary of NI had a booth displaying a few maker projects that involved a Raspberry Pi and LINX, an open-source program for developing embedded applications using LabVIEW. LINX includes VIs (virtual instruments) for some 30 embedded sensors as well as hardware-agnostic APIs for accessing peripherals like digital I/O, analog I/O, PWM, I2C, SPI, and UART. LINX basically makes it possible to run VIs on BeagleBone Black or Raspberry Pi 2/3 boards. At NIWeek, one LINX-based project on display included a piano and touch-sensitive keys based on a Pi. Another added an infrared LED to turn a Pi into a TV remote control that could be taught to mimic standard remotes as might come with TVs from Sanyo or Sony – handy if your factory-supplied remote happens to go on the fritz. A third project was a Raspberry Pi-controlled Sumobot and a two-joystick, two-trigger controller also powered by a Raspberry Pi which controlled a Sumobot over WiFi. According to Sumobot creator Austin Stanton, the bots competed against BeagleBone Black counterparts to see which robot could stay in the ring the longest. Stanton didn’t mention who won.