Austin, Texas—Instrumentation house National Instruments (NI) announces the release of its CANopen LabVIEW Library. Slated for developers of CAN (Controller Area Network) systems, it lets you create industrial control and measurement applications with connectivity to hundreds of industrial CANopen devices, including motion drives, sensors, and distributed I/O.

It's cost-effectively priced, starting at just under $100, and runs on Windows platforms.

NI's library is a collection of high-level LabVIEW functions that convert the company's high-speed Series 2 CAN devices into fully functional CANopen master interfaces. In use, you use a graphical LabVIEW API (application programming interface), included in the CANopen LabVIEW Library, to create CANopen master applications that conform to the CiA DS301 (CAN in Automation) standard.

A Standardized Embedded Network

CANopen, a higher-level protocol based on the CAN physical layer, was developed as a standardized embedded network with flexible configuration capabilities. Originally designed for motion-control applications, the CANopen protocol is now common in many industry segments, including medical equipment, off-road vehicles, public transportation, and building automation.

The CANopen LabVIEW Library also works with NI's SoftMotion controller for CANopen motion drives. It can help you add any CANopen I/O onto a motion CANopen network. The SoftMotion controller is a so-called soft-motion engine that helps you interface between NI-Motion driver software and distributed intelligent drives. You can program CANopen-based Accelnet and Xenus drives from Copley with the NI-Motion API in LabVIEW.

National Instruments, a provider of CAN hardware and software tools, offers CAN interfaces on a variety of platforms, including PCI, PXI, PCMCIA, and its own CompactRIO. NI interfaces are available with high-speed, low-speed/fault-tolerant, single-wire, and software-selectable physical layers.

For more information on any of the NI CAN products, including the CANopen LabVIEW Library, click here.

Click here to view NI’s CAN Hardware and NI-CAN Software for Windows Installation Guide (in Adobe Acrobat .PDF format).

For further details, contact Ernest Martinez at National Instruments, 11500 No. Mopac Expwy., Austin, Texas 78759-3504. Phone: 800-258-7022. Fax: 512-683-9300. E-mail: info@ni.com.

National Instruments, 800-258-7022. www.ni.com