Over 9,000 instrument drivers

National Instruments now offers more than 9,000 drivers from more than 350 vendors through the Instrument Driver Network (IDNet) that simplify and automate connection to stand-alone instruments. IDNet, the industry’s largest source of instrument drivers, includes more than 1,000 new drivers added since November 2009. The drivers are written for the LabVIEW graphical development platform, the NI LabWindows™/CVI ANSI C integrated development environment and Measurement Studio for Microsoft Visual Studio.

Engineers, scientists and instrument manufacturers around the world have relied on National Instruments software and instrument drivers since the first version of LabVIEW was shipped in 1986. With the latest version, LabVIEW 2010, engineers can use the new Instrument Driver Finder (IDFinder) to quickly search IDNet and download different LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers for their stand-alone instruments. IDFinder scans the system for connected instruments; downloads and installs the appropriate drivers; and presents ready-to-run examples to the engineer. IDFinder significantly reduces time to first measurement by helping engineers get up and running without leaving the LabVIEW environment.

From IDNet, engineers can download LabVIEW Plug and Play, LabWindows/CVI Plug and Play and interchangeable virtual instrument (IVI) drivers certified by NI to automate measurements from thousands of instruments. With NI software, instrument drivers can simplify instrument automation across a variety of buses including GPIB, USB, PXI, PCI, Ethernet, LXI and RS232. NI builds all of its instrument drivers using VISA, an industry-standard I/O programming interface that abstracts the underlying bus communication for a consistent programming experience regardless of the instrument bus.