Chapter 1 Getting Started
NI 8352/8353 User Manual 1-8 ni.com
National Instruments modular instruments use specialized drivers suited to 
each product’s specialization. Express VIs provide customized, interactive 
programming of instruments in a single interface, and soft front panels 
provide an interface for testing the functionality of each instrument with
no programming required. NI switches, DMMs, high-speed DIO, 
high-speed digitizers, and sources each have customized drivers for 
high-end modular instrumentation systems. RF applications leverage 
two drivers, NI-RFSG and NI-RFSA, and dynamic signal acquisition is 
available through NI-DAQmx. For more information, visit ni.com/ 
modularinstruments.
You can expand the timing and triggering functionality of your PXI system 
with PXI timing and synchronization products. These products provide 
precision clock sources, custom routing of triggers for multichassis 
synchronization, clock sharing, and more, and are programmed with 
NI-Sync. For more information, visit ni.com/pxi.
NI-VISA is the National Instruments implementation of the VISA 
specification. VISA is a uniform API for communicating and controlling 
USB, Serial, GPIB, PXI, VXI, and various other types of instruments. This 
API aids in the creation of portable applications and instrument drivers. For 
information about writing your own PXI instrument driver with NI-VISA, 
refer to the NI-VISA Help and the readme.txt file in the NI-VISA 
directory. For more information, visit ni.com/visa.
With LabVIEW for Linux and support for more than 200 devices on Linux 
with the NI-DAQmx driver, you can now create virtual instruments based 
on the Linux OS. The NI-VISA driver for Linux has improved instrument 
control in Linux, and NI modular instruments are partially supported. For 
more information, visit ni.com/linux.