National Instruments, a global leader in virtual instrumentation, recently announced LabVIEW 8, a major upgrade to the LabVIEW graphical development platform that improves the productivity of engineers and scientists in design, control and test. This upgrade introduces distributed intelligence - a powerful suite of new capabilities for engineers and scientists to easily design, distribute and synchronise intelligent devices and systems. LabVIEW 8 also features a new project-based environment for developing and managing large-scale applications as well as the latest in Express technology for simplified instrument control. This release also includes significant updates to the LabVIEW Real-Time Module, LabVIEW FPGA Module, LabVIEW PDA Module and LabVIEW Datalogging and Supervisory Control Module.
"For nearly 20 years, LabVIEW has become the pre-eminent solution for instrumentation system design offering unparalleled productivity to engineers and scientists," said Dr James Truchard, NI president and CEO. "With the release of LabVIEW 8, National Instruments expands the platform even further to increase productivity for a broader range of applications and technologies, including heterogeneous test systems, rapid system prototyping, full-scale system automation and embedded realtime, FPGA and microprocessor systems - all using the same time-proven, open and intuitive platform."
Design, distribute and synchronise intelligent devices
LabVIEW 8 extends graphical programming further into test and control systems, from rack-and-stack test solutions to automation plant networks, with new flexible and easy-to-use distributed communication and control tools. The latest version of LabVIEW presents a simplified, scalable interface for communicating with and synchronising between remote intelligent devices and systems, such as realtime processors and FPGAs.
Embedded designers, test engineers and control system engineers now can use the same graphical platform for simple data transfer, deterministic realtime communication and network synchronisation with integrated alarms, events and datalogging.
"National Instruments LabVIEW has evolved into the premier software tool for producing industrial measurement and control applications," said Steve Conquergood, president and founder of Advanced Measurements Inc. "Using a LabVIEW configuration-based approach, engineers can easily synchronise intelligent nodes and incorporate either NI realtime and FPGA-based programmable automation controllers (PACs) or the third-party PLCs of their choice. LabVIEW 8 dramatically simplifies the development, testing and support of distributed applications in test, control and design."
Streamline application and device management
A key new feature in LabVIEW 8, the LabVIEW Project, introduces a new project-based environment for managing large applications and team development. This also includes tools for multiple target management; integrated code differencing and source code control; multibuild management; and the ability to seamlessly deploy applications to desktop, mobile, industrial and embedded targets. With these features, engineers and scientists can more easily integrate LabVIEW into advanced software engineering processes required for managing large teams of programmers or for compliance with industry- and government-defined development process certification standards.
Measure in minutes with the latest express technology
The new Instrument Driver Finder makes it possible for engineers and scientists to automatically recognise connected instruments and search, download and install the appropriate driver from the more than 4000 available on the NI Instrument Driver Network (www.ni.com/idnet). The completely automated process eliminates tedious manual configuration and set-up time, significantly reducing the time to first measurement. With an enhanced DAQ Assistant as well as NI-DAQmx 8 support for simulating NI data acquisition devices, engineers and scientists can begin programming their LabVIEW 8 applications without hardware.
LabVIEW 8 is offered in multiple languages, including French, German, Japanese and, for the first time, Korean, as well as LabVIEW documentation in simplified Chinese. For more than 17 years, NI has supplied European and Asian markets with localised services and support in local languages, currencies and time zones with branch offices in nearly 40 countries worldwide.
For more information contact Michael Hutton, National Instruments SA, 011 805 8197, [email protected], www.ni.com/southafrica
© Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd | All Rights Reserved
printer friendly version