Training day
January 1st 2004

Ian Clay, IP&Es editor attended National Instruments seminar covering Computer-Based Measurement and Automation

National Instruments, as anyone who has browsed its website will tell you offers a great breadth of services and training to help users gain a greater understanding of, and to ensure success in, building measurement and automation systems.

Millions of engineers and scientists around the world harness the power of their PCs and the internet to automate their research, design and manufacturing tasks. A new term has emerged in the instrumentation community - virtual instrumentation is now a widely used term to describe the combination of programmable instruments with general purpose PCs. The NI Computer-Based Measurement and Automation seminar discusses the term virtual instrument and describes what virtual instrument mean to both users and vendors.

Virtual instrumentation has transformed test, measurement and automation applications from loosely coupled and often incompatible stand alone instruments and devices into tightly integrated, high performance measurement and automation systems. At the heart of this lies software. The seminar explained the advantages of virtual instrumentation such as the advances in processor power which mean that users can perform complex analysis in real time as the data streams to disk. Other subsystems that have also improved greatly include: memory; graphics and file I/O. The evolution of networking and bandwidth growth are also covered.

One of the subjects covered in the seminar deals with NIs LabVIEW software. LabVIEW is a graphical development environment for data acquisition and instrument control, measurement analysis and data presentation. It gives users the flexibility of a powerful programming language without the complexity of text based programming languages.

While not having the space unfortunately to discuss all that the seminar covered, other topics included PXI; data acquisition; modular instrumentation; system management software; NIs global service and support network and its Alliance Program.

Having attended the seminar I can thoroughly recommend a visit for anyone interested in measurement and automation systems. For future seminar details and dates go to the National Instruments website (address below). For more information or to request a training brochure call: 01635 472400.

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