National Instruments NI PXI-8183

Chapter 1 Introduction

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 a uniform API for communicating and controlling

Serial, GPIB, PXI, VXI, and various other types of instruments. This API

aids in the creation of more portable applications and instrument drivers.

For information on writing your own PXI instrument driver with NI-VISA,

refer to the NI-VISA Getting Started manual and the readme.txt file in

the NI-VISA directory.

You also 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 PXI and can reduce your PXI software

development time. These programs feature extensive libraries of GPIB,

Serial, and VXI instrument drivers written to take full advantage of direct

PXI 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

IEEE4 88.2 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 allows you to choose from standard environments

such as Microsoft Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Visual Studio .NET to

create your application, using tools specific for each language. With

Measurement Studio, you can write programs quickly and easily and

modify them as your needs change.

LabWindows™/CVI™ is an interactive ANSI C programming

environmentdesigned 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.