National Instruments motion control development system

National Instruments has announced NI VeriStand 2009, a configuration-based software environment for creating real-time testing applications such as hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and controlled environmental tests.

Common functionalities of a real-time test system are implemented inside NI VeriStand in a ready-to-use format, making it possible for real-time test system developers to complete their test application development more efficiently. NI VeriStand helps developers configure a multicore-ready, real-time engine capable of supporting third-party I/O interfaces including a variety of data acquisition and field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based I/O interfaces as well as triggerable data logging and stimulus-generation tasks.

Customers’ control algorithms and simulation models often required by real-time testing applications also can be imported into NI VeriStand from NI LabVIEW software and many other third-party modelling environments, including The MathWorks Simulink and ITI SimulationX software environments because NI VeriStand is an open environment for real-time test system development.

NI VeriStand assists engineers in developing real-time test systems faster by giving them the ability to quickly capture the essential hardware I/O, simulation model and other real-time task settings using an interactive system explorer window. These settings are saved in a system definition that is deployed to a real-time execution target such as a PXI system.

The software is designed to be customised and extended using the LabVIEW, LabVIEW FPGA Module, NI TestStand, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Python environments, ensuring that NI VeriStand can adapt to meet virtually any application requirement.