Universal driver for Labview Shmulik Zobel Pia Zobel

LabVIEW A program for data acquisition, instrument control, measurement analysis, and data presentation Very useful because of it’s graphical envirement

Drivers in LabVIEW LabVIEW controls the instruments it is using by drivers Usually there is a specific driver for each instrument

What is a instrument driver An instrument driver is a set of software routines that control a programmable instrument. Each routine corresponds to a programmatic operation such as configuring, reading from, writing to, and triggering the instrument.

The disadvantage No flexibility because a new specific driver is needed for each new instrument The end user with a new instrument needs to know the lower level (writing drivers)

Our Project To solve the problem Write a universal driver that with minimal configuration, works for many different drivers

Writing drivers in LabVIEW LabVIEW provides built in routines for drivers called VI’s that control and communicate with the instruments It is possible to write a driver by putting together a few of these VI’s and editing them for the specific instrument – this is called a Plug and Play Drive

VISA ( Virtual Instrumentation Software Architecture) The protocol used for writing the VI’s Using this protocol it is possible to write custom VI’s needed for instruments

IVI Drivers IVI drivers are more sophisticated drivers that allow for simulation and instrument interchangeability. It is not required to rewrite an application to use it with a similar instrument type.

Our Driver Using these different protocols and kind of drivers we will try to build our universal driver

Schedule Middle of first semester – finish design of driver The end of the first semester – finish writing a driver for a specific instrument The end of the second semester – write the universal driver