Optimized Automation Knowledge Center

Welcome to the Optimized Automation Knowledge Center sponsored by National Instruments. To compete in today's global economy engineers responsible for plant automation are looking for new techniques to reduce time to market and lower the cost of manufacturing. With the National Instruments suite of graphical system design tools, you can increase throughput and reduce operating costs through advanced control, high-speed measurements, precision motion, machine vision, and human machine interfaces (HMIs). This website offers the latest information for optimizing your automation system. Visit ni.com/industrial for more information

About National Instruments

National Instruments is transforming the way engineers and scientists design, prototype and deploy systems for measurement, automation and embedded applications. NI empowers customers with off-the-shelf software such as NI LabVIEW and modular cost-effective hardware and sells to a broad base of more than 25,000 different companies worldwide each year. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 4,300 employees and direct operations in nearly 40 countries.

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Contact National Instruments

National Instruments Corporation
11500 N Mopac Expwy
Austin, TX 78759-3504
Tel: (800) 531-5066
Fax: 512-683-8411
E-mail customer service

Technical White Papers

PACS for Industrial Control, the Future of Control

With a number of vendors producing Programmable Automation Controllers that combine the functionality of a PC and reliability of a PLC, PACs today are increasingly being incorporated into control systems. This white paper explores the origins of the PAC, how PACs differ from PLCs and PCs and the future direction of industrial control with PACs.

10 Essential Technologies for High-Performance Motion Control

Motion controllers have incorporated key technologies over the years to meet the increasing demands of high-performance applications such as profile cutting and wafer inspection. This document covers the top 10 key technologies that impact your high-performance motion control applications.

Building Distributed Monitoring and Control Systems with LabVIEW

This paper examines the benefits of creating distributed monitoring and control systems as well as the fundamentals of building these systems. Engineers can use the concepts presented in this paper to design reliable, high performance systems today that can easily integrate with future technologies.

NI Connectivity to Industrial Communications

National Instruments programmable automation controllers (PACs) and LabVIEW software can add a wide variety of functionality to existing programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and industrial systems. Machine condition monitoring, high-speed analog measurements, and custom vision applications are a few examples of typical PAC applications. Communication between the PLC and PAC systems is extremely important and must be simple, effective, and often times deterministic. Common methods include using basic analog and digital I/O, as well as the widespread standard, OLE for Process Control (OPC). For more complex fieldbus systems, there exists a large number of industrial protocols used in process automation, machine building, and other such markets. This white paper explains how you can use industrial communications to connect to your existing networks with LabVIEW and PACs.