Physical-knob devices for LabVIEW

[ElvisMARROQUIN]

Hello everyone,

I’m looking for a device with multiple physical knobs that can connect directly to LabVIEW without relying on proprietary software.
My goal is to replace the digital knobs in the LabVIEW program with real knobs/potentiometers that have good resolution and low latency for real-time control applications.
Currently my program has several digital knobs, but it’s very tiresome to manipulate them all with the mouse.

What models do you recommend for this use? Are they native to LabVIEW or do they require drivers?

Thanks for your help.

[santo_13]

Get a DAQ, wire a bunch of potentiometers to the analog inputs and update your code to read the potentiometer from the analog value and you got yourself a physical knob, now, all your knobs in LV FP will change from input to output as it will indicate the position of the real potentiometer instead of giving input to the code.

[GerdW]

Hi Elvis,

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@ElvisMARROQUIN wrote:

My goal is to replace the digital knobs in the LabVIEW program with real knobs/potentiometers that have good resolution and low latency for real-time control applications.

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There are several manufactures of "real" buttons/knobs/joysticks, that provide hardware with a communication bus (like CAN).

You can also use such hardware, but need to make sure you can use the communication bus…

(example)

[altenbach]

You are correct that virtual knobs are not a good input method because a circular motion is not natural for mouse control. Virtual linear sliders would be much easier to operate.

Can you explain your definition of the term "real-time control applications". I assume this is just under plain windows, not a realtime OS running LabVIEW RT.

You already got some "engineering" suggestion using specialized hardware, but that might not be needed.

Depending on your needs, maybe a plain USB joystick would be sufficient. Have a look here. Another option would be to e.g. use a 2D image and parse XY movements of the mouse while the mouse button is pressed, giving you simultaneous access to two semi-analog values that can be scaled into whatever your code needs.

Similarly, you could parse keyboard interactions, (e.g. as used in games: WASD for direction and steering). Most keyboards can handle many simultaneous key presses (anti-ghosting) and the limit is in the number of available fingers. 😄