PXI (and PXIe) are PC based technologies that instrument vendors have extended for use in instrumentation (PXI is an acronym for PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation).  The PXI Systems Alliance was formed in 1998 to manage the standard. This article is designed to give you a feel for what the technology is and when it is used […]

The Measurement Chain I like to look at a data acquisition system as a measurement chain. Each link in the chain is responsible for taking some information and transforming it in some way. Why a chain? Every link has a responsibility to maintain the quality of the stage before as far as possible. One strong […]

Do you need high-quality measurements from different sensors? If you do and you’ve spoken to National Instruments or Wiresmith Technology, then you may have been recommended compactDAQ. This article will help you understand what it is, what it is good at and what it is not good for. What is CompactDAQ? compactDAQ (cDAQ) is a […]

Electrical generation is undergoing a transformation with renewable energy sources growing rapidly. What is good for the earth is not necessarily good for the power grid! National Grid need to measure the impact of these sources on the power quality of the UK distribution network and we are working with them to develop a distributed […]

The Challenge: Increasing understanding of the performance of a revolutionary compressor in real world environments to validate the theoretical analysis and advance the design of the Blade Compressor, refining its performance across multiple industry applications. The Solution: Creating multiple test beds capable of measuring many channels at high and low speeds simultaneously through a smaller […]

Maybe you’ve been told that you should be using LabVIEW by an engineer? Or you’re looking at National Instruments hardware and come across LabVIEW? But what is LabVIEW and will it suit your needs.  We have written this article to give you a quick introduction to this powerful software so you can decide if you […]

If you spend any time on National Instruments product pages, you will come across Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) programmed with LabVIEW FPGA. What on earth do these have to do with measurement systems? FPGA’s are an embedded computing platform which provides some unique capabilities: They implement a hardware circuit giving very high-speed processing. We […]