Monday, September 13, 2010

Agilent’s Endorsement of PXI

At IEEE AUTOTESTCON today, Agilent announced the release of 43 PXI devices, their strongest commitment to PXI to date.

This is a great endorsement for modular instrumentation on the PXI platform.  It’s also an acknowledgement that no single instrumentation bus is perfect for every test scenario.

As a software guy, I was especially pleased to see this comment in the EE Times product review

Software and I/O is not an afterthought for high-performance instruments, but an integral part of the system-level execution that users must implement. […] Each module also includes drivers which are specific to the operating environment: IVI-C, IVI-COM, and [LabVIEW] G, with context-sensitive help…

As I’ve said in earlier posts, no single driver technology works well in all development environments.  So I’m pleased to see that every Agilent PXI module includes drivers for several different development environments—IVI-C for C/C++ users, IVI-COM for Microsoft COM languages, and LabVIEW drivers for LabVIEW users.

I have not yet seen the LabVIEW drivers for Agilent’s PXI modules, but I’m anxious to see what they look like, and see how well they work in the LabVIEW environment.  Stay tuned.

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