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Mathematica Link for LabVIEW Integrates Design Models and Measurements

New Software Links Wolfram Research's Computing Capabilities with NI's Measurement Expertise

August 14, 2002--Wolfram Research, Inc. and National Instruments (NI) today announced the availability of Mathematica Link for LabVIEW, a new technical-computing application created by BetterVIEW Consulting. This software bridges NI's LabVIEW graphical development environment and Wolfram Research's Mathematica technical computing software to help engineers and scientists more easily acquire and analyze measurements throughout all phases of the design process.

Mathematica Link for LabVIEW combines the data acquisition, analysis, and graphical user interface capabilities of LabVIEW and the modeling and analysis algorithms of Mathematica to speed development of custom applications in hundreds of industries from quantum mechanics to automotive. With this software, engineers can control a LabVIEW application (Virtual Instrument, or VI) from Mathematica or access Mathematica from within a LabVIEW VI.

"Using Mathematica Link for LabVIEW, design engineers can easily integrate both LabVIEW and Mathematica functionality into product modeling and prototyping in a single development environment," said Ray Almgren, NI Vice President of Product Strategy. "Design engineers can use Mathematica's unique symbolic processing to calculate mathematical models for product designs, while using LabVIEW to compare these designs to real-world data."

Mathematica Link for LabVIEW features built-in, high-level functions for creating a communication path between LabVIEW and Mathematica to achieve seamless integration throughout the design flow, from the first mathematical model to validating the final design. For example, engineers and scientists can easily send numeric computations to the Mathematica kernel and return results to LabVIEW, visualize LabVIEW data using native Mathematica data visualization functions, and create simple, yet flexible simulation and control VIs that take advantage of the symbolic programming capabilities of Mathematica.

"Integrating two leading technical computing systems like Mathematica and LabVIEW brings technical professionals one step closer to having the ideal, start-to-finish work environment," said Conrad Wolfram, Director of Strategic and International Development at Wolfram Research. "With Mathematica Link for LabVIEW, not only can easily acquired data be more comprehensively analyzed, but new vistas open up for programmed report writing and symbolic control of data acquisition."

Mathematica Link for LabVIEW requires Mathematica 4.1 or later and LabVIEW 6.0 or later and is available for Windows and Macintosh platforms.