NI enhances Measurement Studio software

Measurement Studio 8.6 features a complete set of .Net and C++ class libraries; instrument control driver support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008; Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC) 9.0; and the .Net Framework 3.5.

Engineers using .Net also can use Measurement Studio 8.6 to support applications with select modular instruments by building benchmark applications in Visual Studio 2008.

Measurement Studio 8.6 simplifies the task of connecting to and communicating with a variety of instruments.

With the Measurement Studio interface, engineers can acquire data from GPIB, USB, serial, Ethernet, PXI and VXI instruments using the built-in instrument I/O libraries or using built-in instrument drivers.

With Measurement Studio 8.6, .Net developers can use the Technical Data Management Streaming (TDMS) .Net API, which provides a method to describe and store measurement data optimised for high-speed data streaming and post-processing.

With the TDMS file format, engineers can store properties and organise data hierarchically within a test file and quickly capture, display and stream several channels of data from devices.

The TDMS data model removes the burden of designing and maintaining custom file formats.

These files also can be accessed and modified in Visual Studio with Measurement Studio, or in other analysis environments such as NI Labview, Labwindows/CVI and Diadem, or in spreadsheet environments such as Excel.

'In the past, we spent a lengthy amount of time at a research centre processing data after it was collected,' said Larry Roy, vice president of Embedded Logix.

'Using the Measurement Studio .Net class libraries with TDMS file support to store our complex data, we can perform data analysis within minutes of running a trial.' Measurement Studio works with NI data acquisition (DAQ) hardware such as NI USB DAQ, Wi-Fi DAQ, Ethernet-based and PCI Express devices.

Engineers can use built-in channel configurations for scaling raw data, high-speed waveform acquisition and generation, and accurate single-point analogue and digital I/O.

These I/O capabilities, combined with special data types and measurement analysis class libraries, are specifically designed to obtain the data or measurement needed from physical sensors.