National Instruments PXI NI 8171 Series - Manual (Page 15)

Chapter 1 Introduction
© National Instruments Corporation 1-5 NI 8171 Series User Manual
National Instruments Software
National Instruments has developed several software kits you can use with
the NI 8171 series. The software is already installed on your hard drive.
NI-DAQ has an extensive library of functions that you can call from your
application programming environment. These functions include routines
for analog input (A/D conversion), buffered data acquisition (high-speed
A/D conversion), analog output (D/A conversion), waveform generation,
digital I/O, counter/timer operations, SCXI, RTSI, self-calibration,
messaging, and acquiring data to extended memory.
NI-VISA is the National Instruments implementation of the VISA
specification. VISA is a uniform API for communicating and controlling
Serial, GPIB, PXI, VXI, and various other types of instruments. This API
aids in the creation of more portable applications and instrument drivers.
For information on writing your own PXI instrument driver with NI-VISA,
see the NI-VISA Getting Started manual and the
readme.txt file in the
NI-VISA directory.
You can also use the National Instruments LabVIEW and Measurement
Studio application programs and instrument drivers to ease your
programming task. These standardized programs match the modular virtual
instrument capability of PXI and can reduce your PXI software
development time. These programs feature extensive libraries of GPIB,
Serial, and VXI instrument drivers written to take full advantage of direct
PXI control. LabVIEW and Measurement Studio include all the tools
needed for instrument control, data acquisition, analysis, and presentation.
LabVIEW is an easy-to-use, graphical programming environment you can
use to acquire data from thousands of different instruments, including
IEEE 488.2 devices, VXI devices, serial devices, PLCs, and plug-in data
acquisition boards. After you have acquired raw data, you can convert it
into meaningful results using the powerful data analysis routines in
LabVIEW. LabVIEW also comes with hundreds of instrument drivers,
which dramatically reduce software development time, because you do not
have to spend time programming the low-level control of each instrument.
Measurement Studio bundles LabWindows/CVI for C programmers,
ComponentWorks for Microsoft Visual Basic programmers, and
ComponentWorks++ for Microsoft Visual C++ programmers.
Measurement Studio is designed for building measurement and automation
applications with the programming environment of your choice: