Chapter 2 DAQ System Overview
Programming Devices in Software
National Instruments measurement devices are packaged with NI-DAQ driver software, an extensive library of functions and VIs you can call from your application software, such as LabVIEW or LabWindows/CVI, to program all the features of your NI measurement devices. Driver software has an application programming interface (API), which is a library of VIs, functions, classes, attributes, and properties for creating applications for your device.
NI-DAQ 7.3 and later includes two NI-DAQ drivers—Traditional NI-DAQ (Legacy) and NI-DAQmx. M Series devices use the NI-DAQmx driver. Each driver has its own API, hardware configuration, and software configuration. Refer to the NI-DAQmx for USB Devices Getting Started Guide for more information about the two drivers.
NI-DAQmx includes a collection of programming examples to help you get started developing an application. You can modify example code and save it in an application. You can use examples to develop a new application or add example code to an existing application.
To locate LabVIEW and LabWindows/CVI examples, open the National
Instruments Example Finder.
•In LabVIEW, select Help»Find Examples.
•In LabWindows/CVI, select Help»NI Example Finder.
Measurement Studio, Visual Basic, and ANSI C examples are located in the following directories:
•NI-DAQmx examples for Measurement Studio-supported languages are in the following directories:
–MeasurementStudio\VCNET\Examples\NIDaq
–MeasurementStudio\DotNET\Examples\NIDaq
•NI-DAQmx examples for ANSI C are in the
NI-DAQ\Examples\DAQmx ANSI C Dev directory
For additional examples, refer to zone.ni.com.
