National Instruments PCI-8430, Manual

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Time-Saving Development Tools
Your kit includes the NI-Serial software. In addition, you can order
LabVIEW or LabWindows™/CVI™ software from National Instruments to
speed your application development time and make it easier to
communicate with your instruments.
LabVIEW is an easy-to-use, graphical programming environment you can
use to acquire data from thousands of different instruments, including
IEEE 488.2 devices, VXI devices, serial devices, PLCs, and plug-in data
acquisition boards. After you have acquired raw data, you can convert it
into meaningful results using the powerful data analysis routines in
LabVIEW. LabVIEW also comes with hundreds of instrument drivers,
which dramatically reduce software development time, because you do
not have to spend time programming the low-level control of each
instrument.
LabWindows/CVI is an interactive ANSI C programming environment
designed for building virtual instrument applications. LabWindows/CVI
delivers a drag-and-drop editor for building user interfaces, a complete
ANSI C environment for building your test program logic, and a collection
of automated code generation tools, as well as utilities for building
automated test systems, monitoring applications, or laboratory
experiments.
After you install your serial hardware and the NI-Serial software, you can
use NI-VISA in LabVIEW and LabWindows/CVI with your serial interface.
If you already have one or more of these applications and want to use
them with your serial interface, refer to your product documentation for
information about serial I/O functions. For ordering information, contact
National Instruments.
NI-VISA is a standard I/O application programming interface (API) for
instrumentation programming.
In its full implementation, NI-VISA can control USB, FireWire, VXI/VME,
PXI, GPIB, TCP/IP, or serial instruments, making the appropriate driver
calls depending on the type of instrument being used. NI-VISA uses the
same operations to communicate with instruments regardless of the
interface type. For example, the NI-VISA command to write an ASCII
string to a message-based instrument is the same whether the
instrument is serial, USB, GPIB, or VXI. As a result, NI-VISA gives you