At its heart, LINX is a hardware abstraction layer that allows you to have a single LabVIEW interface to a variety of different hardware devices. Depending on the device, you can access it in one of two ways: Remote or Local I/O.

Remote I/O works primarily by running LabVIEW VIs on the development PC. In this configuration the LINX VIs send commands to LINX firmware running on a device connected to the development computer by a USB, WiFi, or ethernet network. These commands tell the firmware to perform pre-defined actions such as reading an analog input or setting a digital output high. Details on how the protocol works and information on specific commands is available here.

The LINX firmware (source code available here) can be built for many different devices. A list if the currently supported devices and their IDs is available here. A reference to many of the functions in the firmware source code is available here.

Custom commands. A guide to creating custom commands in the LINX firmware is available here.