National Instruments PXI NI 8171 Series User Manual

Contents

National Instruments PXI NI 8171 Series User Manual Manual pdf 15 page image

Chapter 1 Introduction© National Instruments Corporation 1-5 NI 8171 Series User ManualNational Instruments SoftwareNational Instruments has developed several software kits you can use withthe NI 8171 series. The software is already installed on your hard drive.NI-DAQ has an extensive library of functions that you can call from yourapplication programming environment. These functions include routinesfor analog input (A/D conversion), buffered data acquisition (high-speedA/D conversion), analog output (D/A conversion), waveform generation,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 VISAspecification. VISA is a uniform API for communicating and controllingSerial, GPIB, PXI, VXI, and various other types of instruments. This APIaids in the creation of more portable applications and instrument drivers.For information on writing your own PXI instrument driver with NI-VISA,see the NI-VISA Getting Started manual and the readme.txt file in theNI-VISA directory.You can also use the National Instruments LabVIEW and MeasurementStudio application programs and instrument drivers to ease yourprogramming task. These standardized programs match the modular virtualinstrument capability of PXI and can reduce your PXI softwaredevelopment time. These programs feature extensive libraries of GPIB,Serial, and VXI instrument drivers written to take full advantage of directPXI control. LabVIEW and Measurement Studio include all the toolsneeded for instrument control, data acquisition, analysis, and presentation.LabVIEW is an easy-to-use, graphical programming environment you canuse to acquire data from thousands of different instruments, includingIEEE 488.2 devices, VXI devices, serial devices, PLCs, and plug-in dataacquisition boards. After you have acquired raw data, you can convert itinto meaningful results using the powerful data analysis routines inLabVIEW. LabVIEW also comes with hundreds of instrument drivers,which dramatically reduce software development time, because you do nothave to spend time programming the low-level control of each instrument.Measurement Studio bundles LabWindows/CVI for C programmers,ComponentWorks for Microsoft Visual Basic programmers, andComponentWorks++ for Microsoft Visual C++ programmers.Measurement Studio is designed for building measurement and automationapplications with the programming environment of your choice: