Editor’s Pick: National Instruments Updates VeriStand

If we lived with all our technology in ancient Greece, we’d probably have NI LabVIEW hanging out on Olympus with Zeus and Dionysus. It’s one of the handful of up-there applications like Excel or Oracle that sets the tone that the others sing to. But if National Instruments had not invented LabVIEW, then my guess is that everyone would speak in awe of NI VeriStand. NI VeriStand does for configuring and deploying real-time testing applications what LabVIEW does for programming measurement and control systems.

NI VeriStand is intended for applications that involve things like embedded software validation, test cells, mechanical devices, and distributed testing across synchronized real-time controllers. But, really, it’s for anytime that you need to build a unique real-time application that has such criteria as high-speed data acquisition and logging, conditioned and deterministic measurements, customized channel scaling, real-time stimulus generation, and the like.

NI VeriStand is a software environment that, out of the box, provides the framework with most of the functionality required for building your real-time testing application, deploying it, and post-processing acquired data. One of its differentiators is its configuration-based format and open software interface. That means two things. First, a short learning curve, so you can get up and running quickly. Two, you can customize and extend it using things like LabVIEW and ANSI C/C++ for the off-the-wall things you need to do. And you can import control algorithms, simulation models, and similar items from LabVIEW and other third-party tools.

A few months ago, National Instruments released a new version of NI VeriStand that helps you configure a multicore-ready engine for your real-time testing applications, which, of course, means more speed for acquiring and analyzing data. The new version also has more built-in automation for creating and modifying real-time sequences, and offers tighter integration with NI I/O hardware for a sweep of jobs, including embedded networks, machine vision, multifunction data acquisition, and the like. It has new features that help you efficiently configure and run real-time testing applications such as HIL (hardware-in-the-loop) and model-in-the-loop simulators as well as test cell control and monitoring systems.

You can learn more about what’s new with NI VeriStand from the link over there. Make sure to take in the videos and sign-up for an evaluation unit from the links at the bottom of the write-up. If your job makes you take on herculean labors like high-speed real-time testing, the latest version of NI VeriStand could be what the fates have destined for you.

Thanks, Pal. — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

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