National Instruments NI PXI-8183 Personal Computer User Manual


 
Chapter 1 Introduction
© National Instruments Corporation 1-5 NI PXI-8183 User Manual
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 VISA
specification. VISA is a uniform API for communicating and controlling
Serial, GPIB, PXI, VXI, and various other types of instruments. This API
aids in the creation of more portable applications and instrument drivers.
For information on writing your own PXI instrument driver with NI-VISA,
refer to the NI-VISA Getting Started manual and the
readme.txt file in
the
NI-VISA directory.
You also can use the National Instruments LabVIEW and Measurement
Studio application programs and instrument drivers to ease your
programming task. These standardized programs match the modular
virtual instrument capability of PXI and can reduce your PXI software
development time. These programs feature extensive libraries of GPIB,
Serial, and VXI instrument drivers written to take full advantage of direct
PXI control. LabVIEW and Measurement Studio include all the tools
needed for instrument control, data acquisition, analysis, and presentation.
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.
Measurement Studio allows you to choose from standard environments
such as Microsoft Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Visual Studio .NET to
create your application, using tools specific for each language. With
Measurement Studio, you can write programs quickly and easily and
modify them as your needs change.
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.