Milestone for instrument driver network

National Instruments has announced that the NI Instrument Driver Network (IDNet) has reached a new milestone of 10,000 instrument drivers for automating stand-alone instrumentation. From IDNet, the user can access free, NI-certified instrument driver downloads for NI LabVIEW system design software, NI LabWindows/CVI and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. IDNet instrument drivers are used to simplify instrument control across a variety of buses including GPIB, USB, PXI, PCI, ethernet, LXI and RS232.

NI has also released a free tool for creating LabVIEW plug-and-play instrument drivers called LabVIEW Instrument Driver Development Studio, so engineers can easily develop their own drivers and upload them to IDNet. LabVIEW Instrument Driver Development Studio provides a powerful and flexible platform that speeds up development through functional SCPI command templates for common instrument types and automatically generates LabVIEW source code for the instrument. Engineers can easily develop consistent instrument drivers by loading and modifying the source code from an existing driver and create sophisticated driver architectures with the drag-and-drop interactive user interface. NI can then certify the instrument driver to verify that it meets established standards.