VIs now run on PDAs and FPGAs

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December 2003 Data Acquisition & Telemetry

LabVIEW 7 Express, a major upgrade to National Instruments' family of LabVIEW graphical development products, dramatically simplifies the creation of measurement and automation applications and extends LabVIEW to a wider range of targets, from embedded FPGAs to Palm OS and Microsoft Pocket PC PDAs.

LabVIEW 7 Express, a major upgrade to the LabVIEW graphical development environment, makes engineers and scientists developing test, measurement and control solutions more productive by delivering a powerful, flexible development tool in an easy-to-navigate environment. It simplifies the creation of measurement applications while extending graphical programming to a wider range of targets, from embedded FPGAs to Palm OS and Microsoft Pocket PC PDAs

"The innovation behind LabVIEW 7 Express is incredible," said Albert Geven, engineering manager of the test and measurement automation group at Royal Philips Electronics. "In the 10 years that I have used LabVIEW, I have never seen such a large leap in productivity in a single version upgrade. Not only did features such as Express VIs and the new data acquisition framework help us reduce development time, they made it easy for colleagues who had never used LabVIEW to step in and begin programming immediately."

Designed to reduce development time for new and experienced users alike, Express VIs encapsulate measurement functionality in easy-to-use, interactive virtual instruments for the most common measurement and automation applications. More than 40 powerful Express VIs streamline development for tasks ranging from data acquisition to signal analysis to file I/O, delivering the power of advanced measurement functions in easy-to-configure dialogs requiring little or no programming.

"Before LabVIEW, engineers and scientists had to make a tradeoff between the power, flexibility and scalability traditional programming languages and the ease-of-use and interactivity of configuration-based tools," said Dr James Truchard, NI president and CEO. "With the release of LabVIEW 7 Express, we are closing the gap between easy and powerful, bringing an exceptional level of productivity and performance to engineers at all experience levels and in all areas of measurement and automation."

Acquiring real-world data is at the core of most measurement and automation systems. While LabVIEW has always simplified this process for users, this version redefines how they make measurements and analyse their data. With a redesigned NI-DAQ driver framework and two new interactive assistants for data acquisition and instrument control, LabVIEW 7 Express makes taking measurements and obtaining meaningful information from them easier and faster.

For computer-based data acquisition systems, the DAQ Assistant helps users configure and define sophisticated data acquisition tasks with the ease of a few mouse clicks. For GPIB, Serial, VXI and other traditional instruments, users can use the Instrument I/O Assistant to prototype instrument control systems, take quick measurements and even develop simple instrument drivers. The Instrument I/O Assistant delivers interactive instrument control, autoparsing of data and automatic LabVIEW code generation.

The release of LabVIEW 7 Express product family includes the LabVIEW base, full and professional development systems as well as the following LabVIEW add-on modules:

* New LabVIEW 7 FPGA module - LabVIEW for developing applications to run in FPGAs on NI reconfigurable I/O hardware.

* New LabVIEW 7 PDA module - LabVIEW for creating portable handheld measurement and control applications on Microsoft Pocket PC or Palm OS PDAs.

* Upgraded LabVIEW 7 realtime module - LabVIEW for developing deterministic, realtime and embedded control applications.

* Upgraded LabVIEW 7 datalogging and supervisory control module - LabVIEW for developing distributed monitoring and control applications.

For more information contact National Instruments SA, 0800 203 199.

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Data Acquisition & Telemetry

VIs now run on PDAs and FPGAs

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