National Instruments has announced NI VeriStand 2009, an open, configuration-based software environment for creating real-time testing applications such as hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and controlled environmental tests. All of the common functionalities of a real-time test system are implemented and optimized 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 modeling environments, including The MathWorks, Inc. Simulink and ITI SimulationX software environments because NI VeriStand is an open environment for real-time test system development. Additionally, NI VeriStand provides a rich, configurable run-time interface that includes a variety of tools to interact with real-time testing applications. The user interface is a run-time-editable workspace, so engineers can create and modify their user interfaces without interrupting real-time test system execution.
“The open, configuration-based development approach offered by NI VeriStand provides engineers with the best of both worlds – the development efficiency and the flexibility – to adapt to any application requirement,” said Mike Santori, National Instruments business and technology fellow.
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. Engineers then can add user interface controls and indicators and map them to the system definition resources to interact with their real-time test systems. They also can use stimulus profile editors to create stimulus and logging configurations that are deployed to the real-time execution target for deterministic execution.
"The open architecture of NI VeriStand allowed our engineers to add support for the third-party hardware interfaces required by our customer,” said Darryn LaZar, vice-president of sales and marketing at Wineman Technology, Inc. “Also, having support for LabVIEW FPGA defined I/O interfaces enabled us to quickly design custom, reconfigurable hardware interfaces for our real-time test system.”
While no programming knowledge is required to use NI VeriStand, the software is designed to be customized 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.
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