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Virtual instrumentation is the use of customizable software and modular measurement hardware to create user-defined measurement systems, called virtual instruments.
Traditional hardware instrumentation systems are made up of pre-defined hardware components, such as digital millimeters and oscilloscopes that are completely specific to their stimulus, analysis, or measurement function. Because of their hard-coded function, these systems are more limited in their versatility than virtual instrumentation systems. The primary difference between hardware instrumentation and virtual instrumentation is that software is used to replace a large amount of hardware. The software enables complex and expensive hardware to be replaced by already purchased computer hardware; e. g. analog-to-digital converter can act as a hardware complement of a virtual oscilloscope, a potentiostat enables frequency response acquisition and analysis in electrochemical impedance spectroscopy with virtual instrumentation.
The concept of a synthetic instrument is a subset of the virtual instrument concept. A synthetic instrument is a kind of virtual instrument that is purely software defined. A synthetic instrument performs a specific synthesis, analysis, or measurement function on completely generic, measurement agnostic hardware. Virtual instruments can still have measurement specific hardware, and tend to emphasize modular hardware approaches that facilitate this specificity. Hardware supporting synthetic instruments is by definition not specific to the measurement, nor is it necessarily (or usually) modular.
Leveraging commercially available technologies, such as the PC and the analog-to-digital converter, virtual instrumentation has grown significantly since its inception in the late 1970s. Additionally, software packages like National Instruments' LabVIEW and other graphical programming languages helped grow adoption by making it easier for non-programmers to develop systems.
Lab VIEW (short for Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench) is a platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments. The purpose of such programming is automating the usage of processing and measuring equipment in any laboratory setup.
The graphical language is named "G" (not to be confused with G-code). Originally released for the Apple Macintosh in 1986, Lab VIEW is commonly used for data acquisition, instrument control, and industrial automation on a variety of platforms including Microsoft Windows, various versions of UNIX, Linux, and Mac OS X. The latest version of Lab VIEW is version Lab VIEW 2010, released in August 2010.
Overview
Academic experimental research requires flexible, customizable, easy-to-use yet powerful tools for developing and implementing new and innovative algorithms, methods, and systems for controls, robotics, and mechatronics applications.
National Instruments offers a complete family of data acquisition, control, and data-logging devices for desktop, portable, embedded, and networked research applications and systems. You can easily configure and program these devices using NI LabVIEW, a development environment and graphical programming language ideal for performing data acquisition and control tasks, as well as for scientific computing and data visualization. Easily design, prototype, and implement new algorithms and mathematical models using a common set of tools that provide different levels of abstraction and models of computation within the same development environment.