For 30 years, National Instruments (NI) has been a technology pioneer and leader in virtual instrumentation. Taking full advantage of the PC platform, virtual instrumentation increases productivity and lowers the costs of test, control and design applications, thanks to easy-to-integrate software like NI’s LabVIEW, which made its 20th birthday last year.
There will be a lot to see on NI’s stand this year, but taking pride of place will be the 20th anniversary edition of the LabVIEW graphical development environment, LabVIEW 8.20. Demonstrations will reveal the software’s new features, including code that is easier to maintain and modify; new wizards that let you create wrapper VIs for library files and LabVIEW instrument drivers that can be exported and used in other programming languages.
On the hardware front, NI plans to show its CompactDAQ USB based data acquisition family of products, the M Series multi-function data acquisition cards, the CompactRIO measurement platform with FPGA based I/O and the Compact FieldPoint programmable automation controller. There will also be demonstrations of the PXI open standard, PC based measurement and automation platform, which provides modular I/O for high-resolution dc to 6GHz RF. There are now more than 1,200 PXI compliant products available from around 70 vendors worldwide.