National Instruments Measurement & Automation Software

National Instruments increases your productivity in developing test, control, and design systems by providing software products for a wide range of functionality.

• Long-term software compatibility and flexibility with emerging technologies
• Rapid application development using interactive and programmatic tools
• Compiled execution for higher performance
• Lower cost of ownership with flexible software

For more than 40 years, National Instruments has been a leading provider of software for research, design, manufacturing, and test applications. In using software to define and integrate your measurement and automation application, you can:

• Create a solution that meets your needs exactly
• Upgrade the system easily to meet changing specifications
• Reduce overall costs by using standard commercial software and hardware instead of a custom proprietary system

• Complete any task — test and measurement applications vary widely and require an extensive set of software tools that integrate tightly with measurement hardware. National Instruments software offering include tools for development of applications that address all aspects of measurement and automation tasks.

• Integrate test, measurement, and control — to fulfill your measurement needs, our software works seamlessly with a wide range of hardware — GPIB, data acquisition, VXI, CAN, FieldPoint, serial, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), OLE for process control (OPC), Fieldbus, and much more. Communication with industry-standard software tools is easily accomplished through our support of open standards such as ActiveX, COM, DLLs, and the Internet.

• Develop with modular, compatible tools — National Instruments software addresses application needs at many levels of the measurement and automation application. NI software includes a comprehensive set of application and tools for implementing instrument drivers, developing test routines, connecting the application across a network, and managing test. These pieces integrate tightly together to complete your entire application.

• Increase productivity — create applications more efficiently with NI development environments. National Instruments LabVIEW delivers software proven productivity gains with graphical programming and a variety of add-on packages to tackle specific applications. You create programs with LabVIEW with scalability from the PC to embedded systems to networked systems. Easily create measurement applications with Microsoft Visual Studio with National Instruments Measurement Studio. Measurement Studio provides productivity improvements specifically for measurement applications. For manufacturing test applications, TestStand delivers a comprehensive set of test management services to get you up and running as quickly as possible. Our toolsets and task-specific application software provide the exact tools you need to solve your unique application.

Research and Design
In research and design, you need quick development and prototyping. With NI LabVIEW and Measurement Studio, you can swiftly create a program, complete measurements from a device to test your prototype, and then analyze your results, in much less time than is essential to build tests in other applications. When you require versatility, National Instruments features open platform scaling, from the desktop, to embedded systems, to distributed networks.

The challenging standards of research and development applications necessitate effortless software and hardware integration. Whether you need to interface stand-alone instruments utilizing GPIB or directly obtain signals into your computer with a data acquisition board and signal conditioning hardware, our software makes integration easy. NI software libraries, examples, DAQ driver software, and instrument drivers for over 1,000 devices can assist you with building test programs swiftly with ease.

Development Test and Validation
With the versatility and power of LabVIEW and Measurement Studio, you can create complicated test processes effortlessly. For automated design verification testing, TestStand offers powerful test management to augment NI development tools. One of the numerous benefits provided across your organization is code reuse. You develop code in the design process, then plug these same programs into functional tools for validation, test, or manufacturing.

Manufacturing
You require manufacturing software to be reliable, high-performance, and interoperable. NI software products, such as LabVIEW, the LabVIEW Datalogging and Supervisory Control Module, and the NI HMI/SCADA package Lookout deliver alarm management, historical data trending, ongoing operation, control, security, networking, industrial I/O, and enterprise connectivity. With the functionality of both LabVIEW and Lookout, you can easily connect to a variety of different types of industrial devices — PLCs, industrial networks, distributed I/O, and plug-in data acquisition boards. With NI software, you can leverage code throughout your organization. By sharing code across your enterprise, manufacturing can utilize the same LabVIEW applications developed in R&D or validation. Then, you can integrate flawlessly with manufacturing test procedures.

Manufacturing Test
Minimizing test time and making development of test procedures easy are the main goals for manufacturing test. NI TestStand provides high performance to meet your demanding throughput requirements with a high-speed, multithreaded engine for running numerous test sequences in parallel. TestStand manages test sequencing, execution, and reporting. Your manufacturing test application benefits from the work previously accomplished in the product life cycle. By creating test code in LabVIEW and Measurement Studio, you have quick prototyping and versatility. With Interchangeable Virtual Instruments (IVI) drivers, you can port test code to alternative hardware configurations.