AUSTIN, Texas, Nov. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- National Instruments (Nasdaq: NATI) today 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, you 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 simplify instrument control across a variety of buses including GPIB, USB, PXI, PCI, Ethernet, LXI and RS232.

NI 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.

Quotes

"We typically check the NI Instrument Network for instrument driver availability prior to selecting equipment for purchase because we are well aware of the amount of development time lost when creating drivers ourselves," said Ernest Clifford, senior systems engineer at Alpha Research and Technology. "If the equipment manufacturer has a LabVIEW driver available, we'll always select that device over one that does not have a LabVIEW instrument driver."

"For over 20 years, NI has been the industry's preferred provider for free open-source LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers," said Ray Almgren, vice president of core platforms product marketing at National Instruments. "We are thrilled that IDNet now provides over 10,000 instrument drivers for automating stand-alone instrumentation."

Click to Tweet: New from @NIGlobal: Our Instrument Driver Network now has more than 10K drivers for stand-alone instrumentation! http://bit.ly/QSTo4Z

Additional Resources

Instrument Driver Network
LabVIEW Instrument Driver Development Studio

About National Instruments

Since 1976, National Instruments (www.ni.com) has equipped engineers and scientists with tools that accelerate productivity, innovation and discovery. NI's graphical system design approach to engineering provides an integrated software and hardware platform that speeds the development of any system needing measurement and control. The company's long-term vision and focus on improving society through its technology supports the success of its customers, employees, suppliers and shareholders.

CVI, LabVIEW, National Instruments, NI and ni.com are trademarks of National Instruments. The mark LabWindows is used under a license from Microsoft Corporation. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries. Other products and company names listed are trademarks or trade names of their respective companies.

Editor Contact: Julia Betts, (512) 683-8165

SOURCE National Instruments