National Instruments celebrates 25 years

Dr. James Truchard, president and CEO of National Instruments, kicked off the eighth NI Week proceedings by welcoming the many attendees who were able to make the conference despite troubling times in manufacturing.

By Gary A. Mintchell, senior editor August 17, 2001

Austin, Tex. Dr. James Truchard, president and CEO of National Instruments , kicked off the eighth NI Week proceedings by welcoming the many attendees who were able to make the conference despite troubling times in manufacturing. Attendance is similar to last year indicating that engineers can still get travel money for conferences that include training. This NI Week celebrates NI’s 25th anniversary as well as LabView’s 15th. Co-founders Dr. Trouchard and Jeff Kodosky led the celebratory cake cutting.

Control Engineering recently recognized that PC-based control has become an accepted choice for many control applications and that there was a developing trend toward incorporating many of the technologies in a form called embedded control. NI has just released a product in that category Field Point 2000. Built on the DIN rail mountable Field Point I/O platform and LabView RT (real time), FP-2000 brings real-time control to this distributed architecture. Ethernet and RS-232 ports provide connectivity, while a bus connector enables communication with attached I/O modules. In another real-time announcement, NI has released a low-cost LabView RT controller for the PXI platform.

Programmers can expand their measurement capabilities in LabWindows/CVI, Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C++ with release 6 of Measurement Studio, the other major product announcement at NI Week. This product update provides programmers the tools to create a variety of integrated test, measurement, and control applications in the programming language of their choice.

In other news, NI and Siemens reiterated their Hanover announcement of plans to work together at the product level to assure integration between their products. Initial products are in beta testing now with product announcements expected in a few months.