What is the best way to understand a complex LabView VI that controls a motor?
My goal is to control the motor from a joystick.
The wiring diagram shown below allows a LabView user to control the motor from the LabView GUI: move a slider up and down either increasing or decreasing the desired velocity. As the slider's value changes, it is fed into a bunch of math controls and eventually gets converted into a command string for the motor to interpret. This command string, if I understand correctly, is bunch of bytes that get written to the serial port.
Instead of using the LabView GUI to control the motor, I would like to use the joystick.
What is the best way to approach this?
The joystick has pitch,yaw,roll,and throttle. Which one relates best to the velocity of a motor?
The answer to your title "What is the most efficient way to quickly understand how a complex LabView VI works?" is probably to do some combination of the following:
To address your specific question about the VI diagram you've posted, I can see various controls for quantities such as Velocity, Position, Amplitude, Max A (amplitude?), Frequency and so on. You need to decide which of these quantities should be controlled by which axis or output of your joystick. Then you need to add code that reads those values from your joystick, and modify the existing code so that the parameters you want to control are supplied by the joystick values instead of the front panel controls. You could probably just put the joystick reading code inside the existing loop, wire the joystick outputs to join up with the wires from the front panel controls you want to replace, and then change the relevant front panel controls to indicators from the right-click menu so that they will show the values you are getting from the joystick.