©NationalInstruments Corporation xi NI8171 Series User Manual
About This Manual
This manual contains detailed instructions for installing and configuring
your National Instruments NI 8171 series embedded computer kit. The
NI8 171 series includes the NI 8176, NI 8175, and NI 8174 embedded PXI
computers.

How to Use the Documentation Set

BeginbyreadingtheNI8171 Series Installation Guide,abriefquick-start
guide that describes howto install and get started with you rc ontroller.
Thismanual, the NI 8171 Series User Manual, contains more details ab out
changing the installation or configuration from the defaults and using the
hardware.

Conventions

The followingconventions appear in this manual:
This icon denotes a note, which alerts you to important information.
This icon denotes a caution, which advises you of precautions to take to
avoidinjury, data loss, or a system crash.
bold Bold textden otes items that you must select or click on in the software,
such asm enu items and dialog box options. Bold text also denotes
parameter names.
italic Italictext denotes variables, emphasis, a cross reference, or an introduction
toa key concept. This font also denotes text that is a placeholder for a word
orvalue that you must supply.
monospace Textin this font denotes text or characters that you should enter from the
keyboard,sections of code, programming examples, and syntax examples.
Thisfont is also used for the proper names of disk drives, paths, directories,
programs,subprograms, subroutines, device names, functions, operations,
variables,filenames and extensions, and code excerpts.
NI 8171 series The terms NI 8171 series and NI 8171 refer to a series of 3U PXI
controllers. Currently,this series consists of the NI 8174, NI 8175, and
NI8 176.