Graphical upgrade

National Instruments has released LabVIEW 7 Express, a major upgrade to the entire family of LabVIEW graphical development products.

This latest version simplifies the creation of measurement and automation applications and extends LabVIEW to a wider range of targets, from embedded FPGAs to Palm OS and Microsoft Pocket PC PDAs.

Designed to reduce development time for new and experienced users alike, Express VIs encapsulate measurement functionality in easy-to-use, interactive virtual instruments for the most common measurement and automation applications.

More than 40 Express VIs streamline development for tasks ranging from data acquisition to signal analysis to file I/O, delivering the power of advanced measurement functions in easy-to-configure dialogues requiring little or no programming.

Acquiring real-world data is at the core of most measurement and automation systems. While LabVIEW has always simplified this process for users, this version redefines how they make measurements and analyse the data.

With a redesigned NI-DAQ driver framework and two new interactive assistants for data acquisition and instrument control, LabVIEW 7 makes taking measurements and obtaining meaningful information from them easier and faster than before.

For computer-based data acquisition systems, the DAQ Assistant helps users configure and define data acquisition tasks with the ease of a few mouse clicks. For GPIB, Serial, VXI and other traditional instruments, users can use the Instrument I/O Assistant to prototype instrument control systems, take quick measurements and even develop simple instrument drivers. The Assistant delivers interactive instrument control, autoparsing of data and automatic LabVIEW code generation.

The release of this product family includes the LabVIEW Base, Full and Professional Development Systems as well as the following LabVIEW add-on modules: FPGA - for developing applications to run in FPGAs on NI reconfigurable I/O hardware; PDA - for creating portable handheld measurement and control applications on Microsoft Pocket PC or Palm OS PDAs; upgraded real-time - for developing deterministic, real-time and embedded control applications; upgraded data logging and supervisory control - for developing distributed monitoring and control applications.