With LabVIEW from National Instruments, you build VIs instead of writing programs. You quickly create front panel user interfaces, giving you the interactive control of your software system. To specify the functionality, you intuitively assemble block diagrams "a natural design notation for engineers and scientists".

The LabVIEW CANopen library provides a set of VIs, which supports communication over the CAN network using the CANopen standard. It supports:

• Host guarding
• Node guarding of connected modules
• SDO message handling
• PDO message handling
• Sync messages
• Emergency message handling
• A local object dictionary

A LabVIEW application can easily retrieve from and write data to the local object dictionary. PDOs can be mapped into the local object dictionary using a DCF file. It is possible to queue async and sync PDOs for individual tasks inside LabVIEW to create separate events for example: data-logging and boolean events. All the time-consuming protocol handling and object dictionary handling is done inside a low-level driver. For configuring the internal object dictionary, external configuration tools can be used.