Wireless features on latest LabView

London  – National Instruments has launched LabVIEW 8.6, the latest version of its graphical system design software platform for control, test and embedded system development. The product, said NI, includes new tools to help engineers and scientists better exploit multicore processors, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and wireless communication.

“LabVIEW offers the shortest path to apply these technologies using parallel programming while providing users the flexibility to define their solutions with application-specific optimisations,” said Dr. James Truchard, president, CEO and co-founder of NI.

According to NI, engineers can use wireless technology with LabVIEW 8.6 to extend applications into new areas of data acquisition, such as environmental and structural monitoring. The flexibility of LabVIEW graphical programming and the ubiquity of Wi-Fi network infrastructure make it easy to incorporate wireless connectivity into new or existing PC-based measurement and control systems, the company stated.

"With support for the latest wireless DAQ devices and drivers for more than 20 third-party wireless sensors, LabVIEW 8.6 simplifies programming of distributed measurement systems with a single software platform," the company explained. "Engineers can now configure DAQ applications easily to use NI Wi-Fi DAQ hardware without making code changes in LabVIEW 8.6.

In the area of test and measurement systems, NI said the new LabVIEW version offers supercomputing performance through multicore-optimised features. This, it adds, will help engineers process increasing amounts of measurement data to meet advanced control application challenges and increase test system throughput.

LabVIEW 8.6 includes more than 1,200 newly-optimised advanced analysis functions that offer faster and signal processing on multicore systems for control and test applications. Vision applications also can benefit from multicore systems by using innovative image processing functions included in the NI Vision Development Module for LabVIEW 8.6 that automatically distributes data sets across multiple cores, NI said.

Test engineers can also use new multicore features to develop applications to test wireless devices up to four times faster with the latest version of the NI Modulation Toolkit for LabVIEW, continued NI. Control system engineers, it added, can execute simulation models in parallel up to five times faster with the LabVIEW 8.6 Control Design and Simulation Module.