News and New Products

Revamped T&M software simplifies use of its vendor’s and a competitor’s products

By Dan Strassberg -- EDN, 5/12/2005

Agilent is not ceding the market for test-and-measurement application-development software to National Instruments’ (www.ni.com) dominant LabView, but Agilent’s latest T&M-software announcements suggest that the company is embracing NI hardware products that don’t directly compete with its own and is also simplifying the use of Agilent hardware with NI software. Agilent’s VEE Pro (Visual Engineering Environment) 7.5 offers easy access to NI’s data-acquisition hardware products, including PXI, SCXI (signal conditioning) and PC plug-in data-acquisition cards and modular instruments. The package also adds seamless access to Microsoft’s (www.microsoft.com) Excel spreadsheet application and to .NET controls and functions. In addition, Agilent’s I/O-Library Suite Version 14.1, which supports IEEE 488 cards and converters that work with industry-standard software-development environments, now works with NI’s LabView and LabWindows.

Both VEE Pro 7.5 and I/O-Library Suite 14.1 are products of the Agilent-Open project (Picture). The project aims to make instruments easier to apply and use by making them conform to industry I/O standards, such as USB 2.0, and to make the software that controls instruments in systems and processes data from them more user-friendly through improved user interfaces and support for software components, such as drivers, that conform to industry standards.

Company representatives say that Agilent has achieved its goal of enabling designers to get an instrument up and running under PC control as quickly and easily as they can get a printer up and running when you connect it to a PC’s USB port. The company claims that it has met this goal with more than 150 of its most popular instrument models. One way in which Agilent has improved its software’s ease of use is through tighter integration with Excel, which, says Agilent, some 90% of its customers use to reduce and graphically display data that instruments gather.

Agilent will begin shipping I/O-Library Suite Version 14.1 in August. All Agilent instruments, converters, and software include a license; otherwise, a license costs $395. The 82357A USB/IEEE 488 Interface and the 82350B high-performance PCI/IEEE 488 interface card each cost $499. The E5810A LAN/IEEE 488 gateway costs $1050. Agilent VEE Pro 7.5 costs $1495; a 50-seat faculty license also costs $1495. Initial shipments should begin in June. An Upgrade from VEE Pro 7.0 costs $495, and an upgrade from VEE Pro 6.x costs $997. A 30-day, fully functional free evaluation is available at www.agilent.com/find/adnvee.

Agilent Technologies, 1-800-829-4444, www.agilent.com.