Chapter1 Introduction
©NationalInstruments Corporation 1-5 NI8171 Series User Manual
National Instruments Software
NationalInstruments has developed several softw are kits you can use with
the NI 8171 series. The software is already installed on your hard drive.
NI-DAQhas an extensive library of functions that you can call from your
application programming environment.These functions include rout ines
for analog input (A/D conversion),buffered data acquisition (high-speed
A/D conversion),analog output (D/A conversion), waveform generation,
digital I/O, counter/timer operations, SCXI, RTSI,self-calibration,
messaging, and acquiring data to extended memory.
NI-VISA is the National Instruments implementation of the VISA
specification.VISA is au niform API for communicating and controlling
Serial, GPIB, PXI,VX I, and variousother types of instruments. This API
aids in the creation of more portable applications and instrument drivers.
Forinformation on writing your own PXI instrument driver with NI-VISA,
seet he NI-VISA Getting Started manual and the readme.txt file in the
NI-VISAdirectory.
Youcan also use the National Instruments LabVIEW and Measurement
Studio application programs and instrument drivers to easeyo ur
programmingtask. These standardized programs match the modular virtual
instrument capability of PXI and can reduce your PXI software
developmenttime. These programs feature extensive libraries of GPIB,
Serial, and VXI instrument driverswritten to take full advantage of direct
PXI control. LabVIEW and Measurement Studio include all the tools
needed for instrumentcontrol, dataacquisition, analysis, and presentation.
LabVIEWis an easy-to-use, graphical programm ing environmentyou can
use to acquire data from thousands of differentinstrumen ts,in cluding
IEEE488.2 devices,VXI devices, serial devices, PLCs, and plug-in data
acquisition boards. After you haveacquired 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,
whichdramatically reduce software development time, because you do not
haveto spend time programming the low-level control of each instrument.
Measurement Studio bundlesLabWindows/CVI for C programmers,
ComponentWorksfor Microsoft Visual Basic programmers, and
ComponentWorks++for Microsoft Visual C++ programmers.
MeasurementStudio is designed for building measurement and automation
applications with the programming environment of your choice: