Time-Saving Development Tools
Your kit includes the NI-Serial software. In addition, you can order LabVIEW or LabWindows™/CVI™ software from National Instruments to speed your application development time and make it easier to communicate with your instruments.
LabVIEW is an easy-to-use, graphical programming environment you can use to acquire data from thousands of different instruments, including IEEE 488.2 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.
LabWindows/CVI is an interactive ANSI C programming environment designed 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.
After you install your serial hardware and the NI-Serial software, you can use NI-VISA in LabVIEW and LabWindows/CVI with your serial interface. If you already have one or more of these applications and want to use them with your serial interface, refer to your product documentation for information about serial I/O functions. For ordering information, contact National Instruments.
NI-VISA is a standard I/O application programming interface (API) for instrumentation programming.
In its full implementation, NI-VISA can control USB, FireWire, VXI/VME, PXI, GPIB, TCP/IP, or serial instruments, making the appropriate driver calls depending on the type of instrument being used. NI-VISA uses the same operations to communicate with instruments regardless of the interface type. For example, the NI-VISA command to write an ASCII string to a message-based instrument is the same whether the instrument is serial, USB, GPIB, or VXI. As a result, NI-VISA gives you interface independence. This makes it easier to switch bus interfaces and means that users who must program instruments for multiple interfaces need to learn only one API.
Another advantage of NI-VISA is that it is an object-oriented API that will easily adapt to new instrumentation interfaces as they evolve, making application migration to the new interfaces easy.
VISA is the industry standard for developing instrument drivers. Most current drivers written by National Instruments use NI-VISA and support Windows, Pocket PC, Linux, Mac OS X, and LabVIEW RT, as long as the appropriate system-level drivers are available for that platform.