Monitoring and Control

National Instruments has introduced a family of LabVIEW products suitable for monitoring and control applications.

The NI LabVIEW family integrates the latest version of LabVIEW with modular software components that solve monitoring applications, such as distributed supervisory control and real-time, embedded measurement and control.

LabVIEW 6.1 builds on the web capabilities of LabVIEW 6i with remote panels, a feature that makes remote monitoring and control effortless. With only two mouse-clicks, engineers can embed a applications' front panel into any commonly used web browser to instantly control the hardware from any PC, laptop, or other web-enabled device.

With this remote panels feature in LabVIEW and the distributed capabilities of the Datalogging and Supervisory Control Module 6.1, users can more rapidly control their machine monitoring or data logging applications from anywhere in the world.

The module delivers all the necessities for system-level monitoring and control, including enhanced data management tools and built-in features for monitoring applications, such as automatic data logging, full alarm and event management, security, and real-time and historical trending.

With these features, coupled with the new LabVIEW tools to maximise the advantages of the web, engineers can better manage live data, efficiently monitor a complete system, store data in remote locations, and connect to a PC, real-time device, or other intelligent nodes. The module delivers improved networking and control-loop performance for device-level control. With the module, users can embed LabVIEW code in intelligent hardware targets ranging from small, low-cost distributed I/O, such as the NI FieldPoint 2000 family, to high-speed, integrated PXI solutions, such as the PXI 8176 RT controller.

The latest version of LabVIEW Real-Time features PID tools that are optimised for multiple control loops to deliver better performance. It now has improved networking speeds so that engineers can share data with other systems in their enterprise at least 10 times faster than with the previous version of LabVIEW Real-Time.