This guide is a collection of white papers designed to help you develop test systems that lower your cost, increase your test throughput, and can scale with future requirements. This white paper describes the difference between a modular instrumentation platform versus a traditonal instrumentation platform.

This series of white papers describe some of the advanced features of the National Instruments High Speed Digital I/O boards. These white papers delve into some of the advantages of these features and how to implement them on the High Speed Digital I/O boards.

Over the past year, the mainstream media has dramatically increased its emphasis on all things "green". Concerns about global climate change, soaring energy prices, and increased government legislation are driving new priorities and expectations - from consumer products to corporate responsibility and sustainability plans. To meet these new demands, companies, big and small, around the world are scrambling to not only create products and technologies that address these concerns but also change the ways and processes by which they are developed. Engineers and scientists worldwide are leading the charge to address one of the largest challenges society faces, and they have the unique opportunity to make a bigger impact on the environment than any government policy. Green engineering provides the tools, techniques, and technologies to foster this innovation.

As the industrial landscape continues to move toward a more automated environment, engineers implementing monitoring and control applications encounter increasingly complex systems. Such industrial control systems often consist of independent Programmable Automation Controllers (PACs) managing specific, individual tasks. As these distributed systems increase in complexity, the control and monitoring tasks must be divided among several such PACs, networked together. Ensuring proper operation of this distributed industrial process requires the direction of system managers and operators. Yet while a central control "hub" is appropriate for managerial supervision, the distributed system is incomplete without Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs) for more direct interaction. The LabVIEW Touch Panel module completes the National Instruments offering for managing remote systems by extending the LabVIEW graphical programming environment to rugged HMI industrial computers. This application note discusses the benefits of the LabVIEW Touch Panel module and provides a detailed step-by-step tutorial for adding an HMI to your existing PAC system.

This paper discusses the top ten things that you should consider if you are considering a new digitizer/oscilloscope.

High-level design tools offer field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology to engineers and scientists who have little or no digital hardware design expertise. Whether you use graphical programming, C, or VHDL, the synthesis process is quite complex and can leave you wondering how FPGAs really work. What actually happens inside the chip to make programs execute within configurable blocks of silicon? This white paper is intended for the nondigital designer who wants to understand the fundamental parts of an FPGA and how it all works "under the hood." This information, also helpful when using high-level design tools, hopefully can shed some light on the inner workings of an extraordinary technology.

This paper discusses the top ten things that you should consider if you are considering a new digitizer/oscilloscope.

This technical white paper describes embedded system development for machine control using a single, automated graphical programming tool chain and Programmable Automation Controllers (PACs).

Explore the mechatronics resources from NI. View example programs for each of the mechatronics focus areas, such as mechanical or control design and simulation, sensing and signal conditioning, motors and actuators, or digital signal processing.

The use of proper lighting is often overlooked when designing a machine vision application. More robust and accurate inspections can be achieved when appropriate lighting techniques are utilized. This application note discusses considerations when selecting lighting equipment and demonstrates how to utilize the Direct Drive lighting controller feature on the NI 17xx Smart Camera with LabVIEW or Vision Builder for Automated Inspection.