NI, Agilent partner to extend functions, flexibility of analytical instrumentation

Austin, TX; Palo Alto, CA— National Instruments (NI) and Agilent Technologies Inc. have formed a joint initiative to create NI-certified LabView instrument drivers for controlling Agilent’s gas and liquid chromatographs. These plug-and-play drivers extend the analysis, automation and I/O integration capabilities of Agilent’s 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 LabView’s graphical development environment and our industry-leading analytical instruments,” says Donna Mazur, Agilent’s chromatograph 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.”

LabView instrument drivers let users 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 experiments and applications. In addition, they can use LabView 7.1’s Instrument I/O Assistant to interactively write commands, read responses and automatically parse data from Agilent’s instruments, which can cut 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,” says Shelley Gretlein, NI’s 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.”

NI 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 chromatograph, which are scheduled for released later this year. These drivers will be available for free-of-charge downloading at the NI Instrument Driver Network at www.ni.com/idnet . Here, engineers and scientists can choose from more than 3,000 instrument drivers from 170 manufacturers to easily integrate their instruments with LabView.

Control Engineering Daily News DeskJim Montague, news editorjmontague@reedbusiness.com

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