Instrument controller

Engineers now can use the National Instruments ExpressCard-GPIB controller for high-speed instrument control on a notebook computer.

The controller is the latest product for portable GPIB control, which also includes PCMCIA and USB.

The controller offers direct control of GPIB instruments from notebook computers with an ExpressCard slot, which is the next-generation interface that comes standard on many new computers.

Host slots can accept modules based on either USB 2.0 or PCI Express. The ExpressCard-GPIB controller incorporates a high-performance NI TNT GPIB ASIC and a Hi-Speed USB chip to communicate with GPIB instruments at transfer rates of up to 8 MBps.

The controller interface is transparent to software applications and drivers, so engineers can run existing GPIB applications on the controller with no changes. It comes with NI-488.2 for Windows 2000/XP driver software and a 2 m GPIB cable.

It works with the LabVIEW graphical development environment, the LabWindows/CVI ANSI C development environment, and Microsoft Visual Studio (Visual Basic/C/C++/C#) through NI-488.2 and NI-VISA driver software.