Extending technology for automated instrumentation

System Integration & Control Systems Design

Systems - process or technology specific suppliers

June 2004 System Integration & Control Systems Design

National Instruments, a global leader in virtual instrumentation, recently released LabVIEW 7.1, a significant upgrade to that family of graphical development products.

LabVIEW 7.1 extends Express technology to automated instrumentation and realtime applications with new Express VIs (virtual instruments) for NI modular instruments and NI-DAQmx, advanced debugging and low-level execution timing for the LabVIEW 7.1 Real-Time Module.

"Last year, LabVIEW 7 Express introduced a revolutionary way to create test, measurement and control applications with configuration-based development and code-generation tools such as Express VIs and measurement assistants," said Ray Almgren, NI vice president of product marketing. "By extending Express technology to the broad spectrum of NI automated instrumentation, LabVIEW 7.1 simplifies development for all LabVIEW users, regardless of their hardware platforms."

NI continues to advance automated instrumentation for hardware platforms ranging from high-performance modular instruments to realtime data acquisition systems and handheld devices. With five new Express VIs for NI digitisers, signal generators and high-speed digital I/O, engineers can configure sophisticated measurements and acquire data with just a few mouse clicks. The redesigned NI-DAQmx measurement services software in LabVIEW 7.1, available in realtime applications for the first time, increases performance of single-loop PID applications by 30% and simplifies hardware-timed loop implementation. In addition, the new LabVIEW 7.1 PDA Module delivers more data acquisition functionality, including faster multichannel acquisition and analog and digital triggering. Engineers can use this module to create customised handheld DMM applications and communicate with Bluetooth-enabled devices.

LabVIEW 7.1 also introduces advanced execution timing and graphical debugging for low-level control and visibility of realtime system execution. With the new timed loop, and enhanced while loop, engineers can specify precise timing of code segments, coordinate multiple time-critical activities and define priority-based loops for creating multirate applications. To further optimise performance of their applications, engineers can use the new Execution Trace Toolkit with the Real-Time Module to quickly identify sources of jitter, such as memory allocation and race conditions.

In addition to speeding development of realtime applications on existing platforms, this release extends LabVIEW Real-Time to run on certified desktop PCs. Engineers can now create realtime systems by integrating the large installed base of PCI I/O hardware with desktop PCs. The new LabVIEW 7.1 FPGA Module, which also releases with LabVIEW 7.1, improves efficiency and functionality of embedded FPGA applications. The latest version features single-cycle while loops that execute multiple functions within a single 25 ns 'tick' of the 40 MHz global clock. With this new feature, engineers can use LabVIEW to develop FPGA code that executes as efficiently as hand-coded VHDL. They can also re-use their existing VHDL code in LabVIEW FPGA applications with a new HDL interface node. In addition, engineers now have three new FPGA targets, including the NI Compact Vision System for creating high-performance custom machine vision applications.

For more information contact Michael Hutton, National Instruments, 011 805 8197.

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