Initializing Your VISA Application Introduction

NI-VISA

Introduction

A powerful feature of VISA is the concept of a single interface for finding and accessing devices on various platforms. The VISA Resource Manager does this by exporting services for controlling and managing resources. These services include, but are not limited to, assigning unique resource addresses and unique resource IDs, locating resources, and creating sessions.

Each session contains all the information necessary to configure the communication channel with a device, as well as information about the device itself. This information is encapsulated inside a generic structure called an attribute. You can use the attributes to configure a session or to find a particular resource.