National Instruments, NI Instrument Driver Network

NI's Instrument Driver Network tops 5000 drivers

News Release from: National Instruments
26/05/2006

National Instruments now offers more than 5,000 drivers through the NI Instrument Driver Network (www.ni.com/idnet), the industry's largest source for instrument drivers. With support and connectivity for the latest instruments and communication buses, National Instruments LabVIEW and LabWindows/CVI continue to provide engineers consistent, high-level programming interfaces for remotely controlling their stand-alone instruments.

NI offers a widely recognised software platform, including the NI LabVIEW graphical development platform, NI-VISA I/O library and LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers certified by NI, on the NI Instrument Driver Network to ensure seamless integration and connectivity between the PC and stand-alone instrumentation, such as the latest Ethernet/LAN, GPIB and USB instruments. With source code availability and a standard programming model, LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers give users the ability to easily add instruments to a test system without learning new communication protocols or programming paradigms.

National Instruments worked with more than 225 vendors to deliver instrument drivers for a wide variety of instruments. “Having LabVIEW drivers has been a key element in the adoption of our handheld high-performance spectrum analysers in our customers’ measurement systems,” said Steve Thomas, Product Manager at the Anritsu Company. “We identify the NI Instrument Driver Network as the standard location for finding drivers for our spectrum analysers.”

In addition to increasing connectivity via the Instrument Driver Network, NI has added instrument driver tools to LabVIEW 8 to reduce development time and improve code quality.