NI LabVIEW 8 Tools and Express Technologies Deliver Added Connectivity to Users National Instruments now offers more than 5,000 drivers through the NI Instrument Driver Network (www.ni.com/idnet), the industry¡¦s largest source for instrument drivers. With support and connectivity for the latest instruments and communication buses, National Instruments LabVIEW and LabWindows/CVI continue to provide engineers consistent, high-level programming interfaces for remotely controlling their stand-alone instruments. NI offers a widely recognised software platform, including the NI LabVIEW graphical development platform, NI-VISA I/O library and LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers certified by NI, on the NI Instrument Driver Network to ensure seamless integration and connectivity between the PC and stand-alone instrumentation, such as the latest Ethernet/LAN, GPIB and USB instruments. With source code availability and a standard programming model, LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers give users the ability to easily add instruments to a test system without learning new communication protocols or programming paradigms.
National Instruments worked with more than 225 vendors to deliver instrument drivers for a wide variety of instruments. ¡§Having LabVIEW drivers has been a key element in the adoption of our handheld high-performance spectrum analysers in our customers¡¦ measurement systems,¡¨ said Steve Thomas, Product Manager at the Anritsu Company. ¡§We identify the NI Instrument Driver Network as the standard location for finding drivers for our spectrum analysers.¡¨
In addition to increasing connectivity via the Instrument Driver Network, NI has added instrument driver tools to LabVIEW 8 to reduce development time and improve code quality. These features include:
„hƒnThe Instrument Driver Finder, which helps users instantly search and download drivers from the Instrument Driver Network within the LabVIEW environment
„hƒnProject-style instrument drivers that improve code management and driver protection.
„hƒnThe Instrument Driver Wizard, which helps users automatically generate fully documented instrument drivers based on the industry-defined Standard Commands for Programmable Instrumentation (SCPI) protocol, reducing instrument driver development time by up to 25 percent.
„hƒnThe LabVIEW Instrument Driver VI Analyser Toolkit Plug-In, which gives users the power to compare their drivers to the LabVIEW instrument driver certification guidelines via a set of automated tests.
The National Instruments vision of virtual instrumentation is based on leveraging PC standard I/O and off-the-shelf components. In addition to more than 500 Ethernet/LAN and USB instrument drivers, NI offers many other products to further enhance these connectivity options, including instrument control products that deliver Ethernet/LAN or USB connectivity to existing GPIB and serial instruments; Ethernet/LAN controllers and modules for the network-ready PXI platform; stand-alone Ethernet/LAN-based platforms, such as National Instruments CompactRIO and Compact FieldPoint; and USB-based data acquisition products, such as the NI USB-92xx devices.