Arun Veeramani and Todd Walter, National Instruments

Function block diagrams

A picture is worth a thousand words is a familiar proverb that asserts that complex stories can be told with a single still image, or that an image may be more influential than a substantial amount of text. It also aptly characterizes the goals of visualization-based software in industrial control. A function block diagram (FBD) can replace thousands of lines from a textual program.