National Instruments targets environmental monitoring

Newbury, UK  – National Instruments has introduced an instrument driver that gives users of its NI LabVIEW graphical system design platform the ability to interface with environmental monitoring sensors that communicate via SDI-12 - a serial-based communication protocol for battery-powered intelligent sensors. The NI LabVIEW SDI-12 Application Programming Interface (API) software is claimed to enable researchers, engineers and scientists to easily acquire measurements such as turbidity, dissolved oxygen, tank level, soil pH and conductivity.

According to NI, the SDI-12 protocol makes it possible to communicate with a wide range of sensors and recorders that are most commonly used in environmental data acquisition applications such as climate change tracking, water quality and testing, ecological research, soil monitoring, agriculture and weather analysis. Traditional environmental data, it said, can therefore be connected to the wide variety of I/O that works with LabVIEW to provide a flexible environmental data-logging system.

“National Instruments makes green engineering possible by providing measurement and automation hardware and software to measure and understand real-world data and then to correct or fix the problem,” said John Hanks, vice president of Data Acquisition and Control at NI. “Now, with the National Instruments LabVIEW SDI-12 API environmental sensor software, engineers can shorten their development time when designing data-logging and data acquisition applications that use common sensors from leading environmental companies.”

The LabVIEW SDI-12 API, combined with an RS232 to SDI-12 converter and any computer or NI programmable automation controller that includes a serial port, can be used to make environmental measurements in a laboratory setting or deploy stand-alone systems into remote locations. The software can be downloaded for free from the NI Instrument Driver Network at www.ni.com/idnet. <http://www.ni.com/devzone/idnet/>