National Instruments and Agilent Technologies have announced a joint initiative to create NI-certified Labview instrument drivers for control of Agilent gas and liquid chromatographs
These plug-and-play drivers extend the analysis, automation and I/O integration capabilities of Agilent life science instruments, enhancing their application to custom scientific endeavors such as gas stream analysis in fuel-cell development and hydrocarbon processing.
"These drivers deliver native connectivity between the NI Labview graphical development environment and our industry-leading analytical instruments," said Donna Mazur, Agilent's worldwide chromatographs product marketing manager.
"This provides the thousands of scientists and researchers using our instrumentation with more software development options and the flexibility of a full programming language to meet a wider range of laboratory and production application requirements".
Through Labview instrument drivers, scientists and researchers can quickly automate Agilent instrument operation, easily integrate chromatography measurements with additional analytical instrumentation data and use more than 450 built-in analysis functions such as peak detection and data calibration to create custom analysis routines for specific experiments and applications.
In addition, they can use Instrument I/O Assistant in Labview 7.1 to interactively write commands, read responses and automatically parse data from Agilent instruments, which cuts development time by up to 80%. "Working with leading instrument vendors such as Agilent to create standard Labview instrument drivers ensures that engineers and scientists can easily create tightly integrated measurement and automation systems," said Shelley Gretlein, NI instrument control and connectivity product manager.
"This is part of our commitment to open standards and interoperability that delivers the flexibility of virtual instrumentation to traditional instruments".
National Instruments has released Labview instrument drivers for the Agilent 3000 Micro GC and is currently working on drivers for Agilent 6890 and 6850 gas chromatographs and 1100 liquid chromatographs, which are scheduled to be released later this year.
These drivers will be available for free download at the NI Instrument Driver Network. Here, engineers and scientists can choose from more than 3000 instrument drivers from 170 manufacturers to easily integrate their instruments with Labview.
