Enjoy the superior LabVIEW
September 1st 2005

After four years of engineering effort from 200 developers and 300 beta testing customers, National Instruments has launched LabVIEW 8.

At a product preview in London last month, NI technical marketing manager, Ian Bell, said that there are over 100 new features in LabVIEW 8 - driven primarily by the increasing need to deal with multiple processors on multiple platforms in larger projects. "The small projects that LabVIEW enables often become the building blocks of larger applications," explains Bell. "LabVIEW 8 makes it simple to develop, manage and expand projects with more than one processor on a multi-use platform. It provides measurements in minutes, streamlines project management and simplifies the process of building and dealing with distributed systems.

What this means is that embedded designers, test engineers and control system engineers can use the same graphical platform for simple data transfer, deterministic real-time communication and network synchronisation with integrated alarms, events and data logging.

LabVIEW Project is the new feature behind improved large application/ team development.

Project also includes tools for multiple target management, integrated code differencing and source code control, multi-build management, and the ability to deploy applications to desktop, mobile, industrial and embedded targets. With these features, says NI, engineers can easily integrate LabVIEW into advanced software engineering processes required for managing large teams of programmers or for compliance with development process certification standards.

Express technology has also been honed in the new version.

The new Instrument Driver Finder automates the driver selection and installation process, eliminating time wasted manually configuring and setting up. With an enhanced DAQ Assistant as well as NIDAQmx 8 support for simulating NI data acquisition devices, engineers and scientists can begin programming their LabVIEW 8 applications without hardware.

Express also enables rapid creation of custom instrument drivers via the Instrument Driver Creation Wizard.

NI has also released for add-on modules with LabVIEW 8:

- LabVIEW 8 FPGA Module - for developing applications to run on NI reconfigurable I/O hardware - LabVIEW 8 PDA Module - for creating portable handheld measurement and control applications on MS Pocket PC or Palm OS PDAs LabVIEW 8 Real-Time Module - for developing determinisitic, realtime, and embedded control applications - LabVIEW 8 Datalogging and Supervisory Control Module - for developing distributed monitoring and control applications.

There are another 50 plus NI addon toolkits that extend LabVIEW functionality (see: www.ni.com/toolkits), and hundreds more developed by third parties (see: www.ni.com/labviewtools)

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