National Instruments (NI) has announced that the NI Instrument Driver Network (IDNet) has reached 10,000 instrument drivers for automating standalone instrumentation. It is free to access NI-certified instrument driver downloads for NI LabVIEW system design software,
NI LabWindows/CVI and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET by IDNet. IDNet instrument drivers simplify instrument control across a variety of buses including GPIB, USB, PXI, PCI, Ethernet, LXI and RS232.
NI also released a free tool for creating LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers called LabVIEW Instrument Driver Development Studio, so engineers can easily develop their own drivers and upload them to IDNet. LabVIEW Instrument Driver Development Studio provides a platform that speeds up development through functional SCPI command templates for common instrument types and automatically generates LabVIEW source code for the instrument. NI can then certify the instrument driver to verify that it meets established standards.
“We typically check the NI Instrument Network for instrument driver availability prior to selecting equipment for purchase because we are well aware of the amount of development time lost when creating drivers ourselves,” said Ernest Clifford, Senior Systems Engineer, Alpha Research and Technology.
“For over 20 years, NI has been the industry’s preferred provider for free open-source LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers,” said Ray Almgren, Vice-President of Core Platforms Product Marketing, National Instruments. “We are thrilled that IDNet now provides over 10,000 instrument drivers for automating standalone instrumentation,” Ray added.
