Measurement Studio Expands Your Test and Measurement Programming Power

Today’s workplace is fast-paced, and customers demand high quality products in less time. To meet production needs, engineers must develop applications in weeks rather than months. National Instruments addresses those needs with Measurement Studio – a suite of tools to compliment common development paradigms such as object-oriented programming, ActiveX, and Microsoft .NET technology – to complete test, measurement, and control applications in less time.

Measurement-Ready Tools for Engineers

National Instruments designed Measurement Studio for engineers who create test systems, manufacture control systems, automate processes, or get physical data into the PC. Measurement Studio provides the tools they need to create powerful virtual instrumentation applications, such as the one shown in Figure 1, using standard programming languages. With virtual instrumentation, you can combine the power of personal computers with measurement hardware, such as data acquisition devices or vision and motion controllers. With Measurement Studio, you have the ability to define a solution that you can later add to or update, in which you also can interchange software or hardware.

Measurement Studio takes advantage of one of today's most popular development environments, Microsoft Visual Studio, by adding measurement tools. Thousands of engineers use the Visual Studio development environments to create Windows and Web applications. Measurement Studio adds the measurement tools engineers need to create their applications. Measurement Studio provides a comprehensive set of powerful ActiveX controls for Visual Basic and other ActiveX control containers, and robust object-oriented class libraries focused on providing measurement resources for creating advanced applications in Visual C++. Measurement Studio also integrates native .NET measurement components to the Visual Studio .NET environment.

With Measurement Studio, you can control instruments with as little or as much complexity as you need. Measurement Studio includes libraries, controls, and classes for sending commands to instruments over GPIB or serial ports. Measurement Studio goes a step further by abstracting the bus using NI-VISA, so you can talk to GPIB, serial, PXI, VXI, and Ethernet instruments. You can change the type of bus you use to talk to an instrument without changing all of the code – just change the VISA resource. Finally, you can use IVI instrument drivers to abstract out the instrument vendor from the application. Using IVI instrument drivers, not only can you use a higher level API to talk to instruments – such as “read waveform,” so you don't have to know the cryptic commands to send to the instrument – but also you can easily interchange that instrument with one from another vendor without rewriting or changing any code. Change a value in the configuration, and the code can use a driver with any other IVI-approved instruments, such as oscilloscopes, DMMs, ARBs, switches, or power supplies.

Measurement Studio provides interfaces to plug-in hardware, such as multifunction data acquisition devices. These powerful interfaces not only make it easy to configure and use hardware, but also take the complexity out of communicating with hardware to collect data by setting up memory buffers and having an easy way to use complex parts of the device, such as internal clocks and triggering. Measurement Studio also provides intuitive task-oriented interfaces to vision and motion systems. These interfaces help you not only talk to the hardware, but also complete your measurements, such as measuring an area or a displacement from an image you have acquired. You also can combine many functions into a sequence to do a specific task, such as several moves and captures with a motion controller. You can focus on the task you are trying to accomplish and not how you are communicating with the hardware.

Measurement Studio provides an Advanced Analysis Library for inline analysis of acquired data. The sophisticated analysis routines turn raw data into information that you can use to test or control electronics or processes, respectively, without having to save the data for analysis later with an offline package. With analysis routines ranging from curve fitting, to statistics, to time and frequency-domain analysis, you can provide meaningful information, such as rotational speed, characteristic curve, rate of change, and signature frequency, to help users make informed decisions.

Measurement Studio provides the user interface tools that you expect. Because these interface controls mimic real-life panel controls, such as switches, LEDs, graphs, and gauges, they are intuitive and easy to understand. All Measurement Studio user interface controls have both a traditional and updated 3D look and feel, so you can completely customize the application for the end user. There also are advanced visualization features such as real-time 2D graphing and charting and real-time 3D graphing. With these advanced tools, you can show a user large amounts of complex data in a meaningful way. You can even use cursors to track data and annotations to point out specific areas of interest on a chart or graph. With all of the visualization power Measurement Studio provides out of the box, you can save countless hours of development time versus displaying this data yourself.

In today’s information age, you also need to publish and distribute applications across networks, including the Internet. Measurement Studio simplifies this process with its DataSocket advanced networking architecture. DataSocket is a publish/subscribe architecture with a lightweight separated server to reduce network traffic by passing only updated data to only the clients that want it. DataSocket is also very easy to use with its URL addressing scheme and open/close connection schema. With DataSocket, you can easily publish information to a Web page or distribute and control an application with another application or an embedded Web page.

With the hardware compatibility, analysis, visualization, and Internet capabilities of Measurement Studio, as well as its open platform, you can create complete measurement systems that combine instrument control, data acquisition, vision, and motion. This integration is very evident with PXI, where you can use CompactPCI instruments, as well as multifunction data acquisition, image acquisition, and motion control hardware in one chassis, with easy-to-use synchronization and triggering. With such power and integration, you can create systems such as packaging systems that use motion to move widgets into place, align them, send a test signal and read it back using instrumentation or data acquisition, determine whether pieces are assembled and labeled correctly using vision, and finally move it into a "pass" or "fail" bin.

Fast, Easy Development

Measurement Studio increases developer efficiency and reduces development time. All Measurement Studio components add measurement tools to a proven RAD environment, such as Visual Basic or Visual C++.

Measurement Studio includes wizards to simplify starting applications, choosing drivers, creating servers, and using ActiveX. These wizards help you get through repetitive, difficult, or mundane tasks and get started on development faster. Then they continue to provide assistance by adding, changing, or configuring an in-process project. For example, the Measurement Studio AppWizard in Visual C++ helps you get started by creating mundane code and setting project settings for the type of project you are creating – an executable or a DLL. It also adds the powerful measurement-specific components you need to create a test, measurement, or control application. Then the wizard continues to help because you can add or remove different measurement components, such as user interface controls or instrument drivers, throughout the development of an application. With this wizard, you also can add the Measurement Studio libraries to an existing project to help you complete the application faster and make it more powerful.

Measurement Studio is built with intuitive, interactive interfaces. Using the property pages of the ActiveX controls, you can view edits while you are making them in a preview window. Then you can cancel these edits if they are not what you like. The property pages for hardware even help by telling you which boards are installed and allowing you to choose only operations that can be done with that hardware. The code for the ActiveX controls and C++ classes all integrates into Microsoft Intellisense, which autocorrects syntax and shows you which methods or properties are in use. It also helps you by giving you pop-up tool tips that tell you which method it used and which parameters are required by the function.

Standard Reusable Components

Measurement Studio is built using the latest standard technology, such as ActiveX and COM. Therefore you can take advantage of the latest advances in software technology by simply using Measurement Studio tools. With Measurement Studio you also can build standard distributable modules. You can create ActiveX servers and custom COM interfaces to show the functions of DLLs or EXEs and how to interface them easily into another application. You also can take advantage of ActiveX controls for tasks such as creating Web pages that interface and control an existing system. By using and providing standard/reusable technology, Measurement Studio provides you the means of creating rich applications that can be easily shared and distributed.

Integrate Latest Technologies

National Instruments has always taken advantage of the latest in standard technologies – especially software technologies. As the software technologies throughout the years have changed, NI has integrated industry standards into products to deliver the latest technology benefits to measurement and automation engineers. NI has incorporated standard technologies from DLLs to DDE, which evolved to more component-centric models around COM, VBX, and OCX, and then evolved into OLE, ActiveX, DCOM and COM+. Throughout it all, National Instruments software has delivered these technologies seamlessly to engineers around the world. NI Measurement Studio is no exception. The latest technology affecting the software world is Microsoft .NET. This new 'connected' view of the world is impacting many industries, include measurement and automation. Measurement Studio, of course, integrates into this framework as well. With the advent of Visual Studio .NET, Measurement Studio released native components and class libraries to deliver all of the power of .NET technology to the measurement and automation world. By integrating into Visual Studio .NET, Measurement Studio empowers engineers to develop robust, connect applications on the latest and greatest computing platform.


C++ is known for creating small, fast executables. Visual Basic has made improvements over the years to where it also is compiled and has execution speed similar to that of compiled C code. Measurement Studio takes advantage of the capabilities of these mainstream languages to create lightning-fast execution times for test and measurement applications. When shaving seconds off test times can save you thousands of dollars, Measurement Studio delivers by creating compact, fast executables, DLLs, and ActiveX servers that can stand alone or be added into a larger test system.

Measurement Studio also has taken great strides to use today’s technological advancements to improve execution speed even more. All of Measurement Studio is multithread safe, which means you can separate different parts of an application to run separately and even give them different priorities. This feature means you can acquire data faster and not be interrupted by the user interface. The ActiveX controls are even multithread capable in Visual C++, because the wrapper classes do the thread marshalling for you. This feature makes it possible to separate the user interface from the rest of the application in Visual C++.

With the ability to compile and run C++ code on National Instruments real-time hardware, such as an RT Series plug-in device or PXI controller, you can now add deterministic capabilities to measurement applications. Whether legacy code was developed for an application that did not need determinism but now does, or you need to control a new data acquisition system for exact timing, Measurement Studio has the tools to help you create real-time applications. You accomplish this by interfacing your C++ code with a LabVIEW Real-Time application.

Measurement Studio is built on years of measurement and programming expertise. The code used to create the tools has been thoroughly tested and is very reliable. You can be assured that mission-critical test and control applications will continue to run for many years to come. Because you define solutions with hardware and software, these applications also are highly scalable. You can start with a simple system that continues to grow and expand easily as your needs increase by interchanging hardware and reusing and augmenting existing code.
National Instruments Measurement Studio exploits the proven capabilities of widely used development paradigms, such as C++ and ActiveX, but adds powerful expertise to complete mission-critical test, measurement, or control applications in less time. With the power of Measurement Studio, you get a system that is built for engineers from the start and offers faster development and shorter time to market, reusable standard technology, and fast, reliable performance. When factoring in the power of National Instruments Measurement Studio and National Instruments proven service and support, developers cannot afford not to use Measurement Studio to expand their power and expertise and save time doing it.
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