Faster Time to Measurement Advances in LabVIEW Instrument Control

Faster Time to Measurement Advances in LabVIEW Instrument Control

Instrument Control with LabVIEW LabVIEW can communicate with virtually any instrument Tools for parsing, analyzing, and presenting instrument data LabVIEW Instrument drivers Direct I/O Instrument I/O Asst. GPIB Serial Ethernet PXI VXI Other Instrument Instrument Instrument Instrument Instrument Instrument

Choosing an Instrument Control Interface Is there an instrument driver? Yes Application Needs? Ease of Use Source Code Availability Plug and Play No Advanced Functionality IVI Develop Instrument Driver? Yes Similar Driver Created? Yes Modify Existing Driver No No Build From Template Direct I/O

Using Instrument Drivers Is there an instrument driver? Yes Application Needs? Ease of Use Source Code Availability Plug and Play Advanced Functionality IVI

Instrument Drivers Organized library of functions to control instruments Each function performs multiple instrument instructions Grouped by operation type Configure Action/Status Data Utility Tool to simplify instrument control Set of functions that reduce development time

LabVIEW Plug and Play Instrument Drivers Combination of functionality and ease of development Source code available Intuitive to use Easy to debug Robust, multi-platform Certified and Supported by NI Use common architecture Increase performance and portability Include examples Thousands available

Instrument Driver Finder Find, download and install instrument drivers from within LabVIEW Automatically discovers connected instruments Direct Connection to Instrument Driver Network (www.ni.com/idnet) No longer need to restart LabVIEW

Demo #1 Instrument Driver Finder Find connected instruments Search for and install appropriate driver Open example finder and run an example application

IVI Instrument Drivers Advanced functionality Simulation Interchangeability State caching Limited instrument coverage (but includes most popular instruments) IVI-C Common architecture Certified and supported by NI

SignalExpress IVI-C Steps Interactive, non-programming environment Support for over 300 common stand-alone instruments Made possible through IVI s interchangeability

Demo #2 SignalExpress IVI-C Steps Acquire with IVI Scope step Frequency or time domain measurement

Direct I/O Is there an instrument driver? Yes Application Needs? Ease of Use Source Code Availability Plug and Play No Advanced Functionality IVI Develop Instrument Driver? No Direct I/O

Instrument I/O Assistant 2.0 Parameterized Inputs Can now change instrument commands during run time Improved performance Better code generation Available in LabVIEW LabWindows/CVI Measurement Studio

Demo #3 Instrument I/O Assistant Configure assistant with a channel parameter Analyze data and plot on front panel

Creating Instrument Drivers Is there an instrument driver? Yes Application Needs? Ease of Use Source Code Availability Plug and Play No Advanced Functionality IVI Develop Instrument Driver? Yes Similar Driver Created? Yes Modify Existing Driver No No Build From Template Direct I/O

Project-Style Instrument Drivers Improved source code organization Uses LabVIEW library Provides unique namespace to avoid naming collisions Ability to restrict access to underlying code Improved version management

Instrument Driver Project Wizard Interactive wizard guides you through instrument driver creation Reduces development time Supports most common instrument types The new Instrument Driver Project Wizard in LabVIEW 8 reduces instrument driver development time by more than a week. - David Fink, Software Engineer, Tektronix

Instrument Driver VI Creator Configuration-Based interface Generates LabVIEW code Inherits Instrument Driver Properties Icon banner Library

Demo #4 Instrument Driver Creation Create Scope driver with wizard Open and explore initialize VI Run VI creator and create a measurement VI

Other Instrument Control Improvements NI Spy integration Regular expression parsing Byte ordering Flatten/Unflatten File I/O VISA I/O name control Refresh in dropdown Displays open sessions

Advances In Instrument Control Instrument users Instrument Driver Finder Instrument I/O Assistant 2.0 SignalExpress IVI-C Steps Instrument driver developers Project-Style instrument drivers Instrument Driver Wizard Instrument Driver VI Creator Miscellaneous VISA I/O Name Control String parsing NI-SPY

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