Labview Drivers; Obtaining Instrument Drivers; Instrument Driver Examples - Keithley 708B Reference Manual

Section 5: Remote commands

LabVIEW drivers

Native LabVIEW drivers
A native LabVIEW driver is a LabVIEW driver that is created using entirely built-in LabVIEW VIs — it
does not make any calls to external DLLs or Library files. This makes the driver portable to all the
platforms and operating systems that LabVIEW and VISA supports (currently, Linux on x86, MAC
OSX, and Microsoft Windows).
NI maintains a native
LabVIEW driver wrappers
All IVI-C drivers have a function panel file (.fp) that shows a hierarchy of the function calls into a DLL.
It is a tool that guides a user to select the correct function call in the driver, since a DLL only has a flat
API entry point scheme (unlike COM or .NET). Any CVI generated fp file can be imported into
LabVIEW and LabVIEW will generate a wrapper for the DLL. The drawback here is that the driver is
dependent on the DLL, which is not portable and is therefore Windows-specific.

Obtaining instrument drivers

To see what drivers are available for your instrument:
1. Go to the
2. Select the Support tab.
3. Enter the model number of your instrument.
4. Select Software Driver from the list.
For LabVIEW, you can also go to National Instrument's website and search their instrument driver
database.

Instrument driver examples

All Keithley drivers come with examples written in several programming languages that show you how
to do the most common things with the instruments.
Install the driver. The examples are in the Windows Start menu, under Keithley Instruments >
Model Number (where Model Number is the instrument model number).
5-20
LabVIEW driver style guide
Keithley website (http://www.keithley.com).
Models 707B and 708B Switching Matrix Reference Manual
(http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/3271).
707B-901-01 Rev. A / August 2010