Tools In NI-DAQmx And NI LabVIEW 8 Combine To Save Engineers Time
National Instruments announced the latest version of NI-DAQmx, its powerful data acquisition (DAQ) driver software and the core of its measurement services software shipped with each piece of NI multifunction DAQ hardware. With NI-DAQmx 8 driver software, engineers using all NI-DAQmx hardware – including new PCI Express and USB DAQ devices – can take advantage of the powerful upgrades in the National Instruments LabVIEW 8 graphical platform for design, control and test.
For example, NI LabVIEW 8 offers improvements to existing LabVIEW Express technology to benefit data acquisition, including upgrades to Instrument I/O Assistant and DAQ Assistant. These tools, which streamline system setup by helping engineers interactively communicate with their DAQ devices and instruments, now help developers programmatically modify execution parameters – such as acquisition rate – in the assistants during run time.
NI-DAQmx 8 is also supported by the new shared variable engine in LabVIEW 8. Engineers can use this feature to easily share data between two nodes, including real-time and supervisory nodes, within a distributed control and monitoring system. The LabVIEW Project Explorer helps engineers manage and target all networked real-time and I/O nodes used in the system and then download, execute and debug LabVIEW measurement applications on all computing nodes simultaneously, saving development time and accelerating productivity.
In addition to the increased integration with LabVIEW 8, NI-DAQmx 8 features the new NI Device Monitor, an automatic dialog that makes setting up applications with USB connectivity even easier. NI-DAQmx users can choose from a list of common tasks for USB applications, including running test panels and starting a data logging task. Engineers who need to thoroughly document their data acquisition systems can quickly create complete documentation using the new report generation capability in the Measurement & Automation Explorer (MAX), the configuration software component included in the NI measurement services software suite. Similarly, customers with high-channel-count systems now can import and export data acquisition system configurations in MAX to human-readable file formats such as Microsoft Excel.
For more information on NI-DAQmx and other data acquisition software included in the NI measurement services software suite, visit www.ni.com/dataacquisition/software.
SOURCE: National Instruments