Virtual instrumentation or instruments are truly instruments like a digital voltmeter, digital counter, or oscilloscope. However, the difference between a virtual instrument and conventional instrumentation is great.

Without the displays, knobs and switches of a conventional, external box-based instrumentation products such as those offered by Agilent, Keithley Instruments, Fluke and others, a virtual instrument uses a personal computer for all user interaction and control.

In many common measurement applications, a data acquisition board or card, with a personal computer and software, can be used to create an instrument. In fact, a multiple purpose virtual instrument can be made my using a single data acquisition board or card.

The primary benefits of apply data acquisition technology to configure virtual instrumentation include costs, size, and flexibility and ease of programming.

The cost to configure a virtual instrumentation based system using a data acquisition board or cards can be as little as 25% of the cost of a conventional instrument.

Conventional instruments as compared to a virtual instrumentation can be very large and cumbersome. They also require a lot of power, and often have excessive amounts of features that are rarely, if ever used.

Most conventional instruments do not have any computational power as compared to a virtual instrument. Since the virtual instrument is part of a person computer configuration, the personal computer’s computational as well as controlling capability can be applied into a test configuration.

Conventional instruments even with an available IEEE-488 interface can be very awkward when trying to configure it with a personal computer to create a test system.

Measurement Computing Corporation offers the largest selection of PC-based data acquisition and measurement products. Shop our online catalog by selecting a category above. From PCI, PC/104, ISA, and PCMCIA bus boards to external systems based on USB, RS-232, RS-422, RS-485, and GPIB interfaces; Measurement Computing has everything you need for your PC-based data acquisition and control applications.