MAY 20--National Instruments (Austin, TX; www.ni.com), a provider of virtual instrumentation, has released LabVIEW 7 Express, a major upgrade to the entire family of LabVIEW graphical development products. LabVIEW 7 Express 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.
Designed to reduce development time for new and experienced users alike, Express VIs encapsulate measurement functionality in easy-to-use, interactive virtual instruments for common measurement and automation applications. More than 40 powerful Express VIs ease the development for tasks ranging from data acquisition to signal analysis to file I/O, delivering 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 of traditional programming languages and the ease-of-use and interactivity of configuration-based tools," says James Truchard, NI president and chief executiveofficer. "With the release of LabVIEW 7 Express, we are closing the gap between easy and powerful, bringing productivity and performance to engineers at all experience levels and in all areas of measurement and automation."
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 than before. For computer-based data acquisition systems, the DAQ Assistant helps users configure and define 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 develop simple instrument drivers. The Instrument I/O Assistant delivers interactive instrument control, autoparsing of data, and automatic LabVIEW code generation.
