National Instruments Now Offers More Than 6,000 Drivers for Instrument Control

Drivers Make It Easy for Users to Control Stand-Alone Instruments from LabVIEW and LabWindows™/CVI

NEWS RELEASE – June 2008 – National Instruments now offers more than 6,000 drivers through the NI Instrument Driver Network, the industry’s largest source for instrument drivers. Written for the NI LabVIEW graphical system design platform, the NI LabWindows™/CVI ANSI C integrated development environment and Microsoft Visual Studio, the instrument drivers make it easy for users to connect to and control stand-alone instruments from more than 275 vendors.

For more than 30 years, National Instruments has been a leader in developing technology for integrating and connecting computers with stand-alone instrumentation. With the NI Instrument Driver Network, users can download LabVIEW Plug and Play and Interchangeable Virtual Instrument (IVI) instrument drivers certified by NI and remotely control thousands of instruments, including the latest PXI, Ethernet, LXI, GPIB and USB instruments, from LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI or Visual Studio. National Instruments continually works with industry-leading instrumentation vendors including Agilent Technologies, Anritsu Company and Tektronix to develop drivers for a wide variety of popular instruments such as multimeters, oscilloscopes and signal generators.

In addition to providing extensive support for the most popular instrumentation, the NI Instrument Driver Network now includes the LabVIEW SDI-12 API for interfacing with thousands of environmental monitoring sensors. The SDI-12 protocol is commonly used for environmental data acquisition (EDA) applications such as climate change tracking, water collection and testing, ecological research, soil monitoring, agriculture and weather analysis. By combining the SDI-12 API with the flexibility of LabVIEW, users can create SDI-12 applications ranging from simple data collection and analysis to automated communication, data recording and Web publishing.

Adopted by engineers and scientists worldwide, LabVIEW provides a high-level, easy-to-use programming interface that is ideal for instrument control. The software also offers tools that reduce development time such as the Instrument Driver Finder, which helps users instantly search and download drivers from the NI Instrument Driver Network within the LabVIEW environment, and the Instrument I/O Assistant, a utility that helps users perform simple instrument I/O tasks or create their own instrument drivers. Additionally, LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers provide source code native to the development environment and a standard programming model, making it easy to add instruments to a test system without learning new communication protocols or programming paradigms.

Readers can visit www.ni.com/idnet to access the more than 6,000 instrument drivers available on the NI Instrument Driver Network.