NI Offers More Than 5,000 Instrument Drivers

NI LabVIEW 8 Tools and Express Technologies Deliver Added Connectivity to Users May 23, 2006 – National Instruments now offers more than 5,000 drivers through the NI Instrument Driver Network, 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 recognized 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 analyzers 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 analyzers.”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: • The Instrument Driver Finder, which helps users instantly search and download drivers from the Instrument Driver Network within the LabVIEW environment • Project-style instrument drivers that improve code management and driver protection. • The 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. • The LabVIEW Instrument Driver VI Analyzer 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.About the Instrument Driver NetworkThe Instrument Driver Network is the industry’s largest source for LabVIEW and LabWindows/CVI instrument drivers. Engineers and scientists can access more than 5,000 instrument drivers from more than 225 vendors, supporting GPIB, Ethernet/LAN, USB and serial I/O communication buses.About National InstrumentsFor 30 years, National Instruments has been a technology pioneer and leader in virtual instrumentation – a revolutionary concept that has changed the way engineers and scientists in industry, government and academia approach measurement and automation. Leveraging PCs and commercial technologies, virtual instrumentation increases productivity and lowers costs for test, control and design applications through easy-to-integrate software, such as NI LabVIEW, and modular measurement and control hardware for PXI, PCI, PCI Express, USB and Ethernet. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 3,900 employees and direct operations in nearly 40 countries. For the past seven years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America.

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