Using Pickering Drivers in National Instruments LabVIEW™
Most Pickering drivers include a LabVIEW wrapper to permit full operation of the Pickering switching modules from the LabVIEW environment. These wrappers are typically installed to the current LabVIEW folder system during the installation of the Pickering driver. Take a look at our video: Operating Pickering Switching Modules using LabVIEW
The process of controlling a Pickering product normally consists of the following steps:
- Open a control session on the product
- Use functions in the library to operate the product
- Close the control session
In the case of LXI products, there is an additional step to establish a communication session on the remote LXI device before opening the control session on the hardware. This communication session should also be terminated when no longer required.
The LabVIEW libraries are wrappers of the underlying low-level driver, and full details of the functions can be found in the corresponding low-level driver documentation.
Please look below for simple examples using the most common Pickering drivers (or go to the LabVIEW example software page here: https://downloads.pickeringtest.info/downloads/example_software/LabVIEW/). In all examples, the program opens a card, obtains its card identity, operates a single switch and then closes the card. Downloads and documentation are provided with each example.
PXI VISA Driver - pipx40
PXI Direct IO Driver - pilpxi
IVI Driver - pi40iv
LXI Direct IO Driver - piplx (and picmlx)
