National Instruments Offers 6,000 Instrument Drivers

National Instruments now offers more than 6,000 drivers through the NI Instrument Driver Network, the industry’s source for instrument drivers. Written for the NI LabVIEW graphical system design platform, the NI LabWindows/CVI ANSI C integrated development environment and Microsoft Visual Studio, the instrument drivers allow users to connect to and control stand-alone instruments from more than 275 vendors.

With the NI Instrument Driver Network, users can download LabVIEW Plug and Play and Interchangeable Virtual Instrument (IVI) instrument drivers certified by NI and remotely control thousands of instruments, including the PXI, Ethernet, LXI, GPIB and USB instruments, from LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI or Visual Studio. s

In addition, the NI Instrument Driver Network now includes the LabVIEW SDI-12 API for interfacing with environmental monitoring sensors. NI claims the SDI-12 protocol is commonly used for environmental data acquisition (EDA) applications such as climate change tracking, water collection and testing, ecological research, soil monitoring, agriculture and weather analysis.

By combining the SDI-12 API with LabVIEW, users can create SDI-12 applications ranging from simple data collection and analysis to automated communication, data recording and Web publishing.