Chapter 1
Introduction
©
National Instruments Corporation
1-5
National Instruments Application Software
In addition to the NI-VISA/NI-VXI software, you can use the National
Instruments LabVIEW and Measurement Studio application programs and
instrument drivers to ease your programming task. These standardized
programs match the modular virtual instrument capability of VXI and can
reduce your VXI/VME software development time. These programs are
fully VXI
plug&play
compliant and feature extensive libraries of VXI
instrument drivers written to take full advantage of direct VXI control.
LabVIEW and Measurement Studio include all the tools needed for
instrument control, data acquisition, analysis, and presentation.
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.
Measurement Studio bundles LabWindows/CVI for C programmers,
ComponentWorks for Microsoft Visual Basic programmers, and
Compone+ for Microsoft Visual C++ programmers.
Measurement Studio is designed for building measurement and automation
applications with the programming environment of your choice:
•
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.
•
ComponentWorks for Visual Basic is a collection of ActiveX controls
designed for building virtual instrumentation systems. Based on
ActiveX technology, ComponentWorks controls are configured
through simple property pages. You can use the ComponentWorks
GPIB, Serial, and VISA I/O controls and property pages to set up
communication with your instruments.
•
Compone+ for Visual C++ takes advantage of integrated
C++ libraries and ActiveX to help you build measurement and
automation applications. With the Compone+ instrument
classes, you can use the IEEE 488.2 library and VISA, an