Visio stencils of NI components

[eganders]

Is there any place where I can obtain stencils of NI components to be used to interconnect them and connect them to external components?

[Dennis_Knutson]

You should check into NetZoom for Visio. They have some NI shapes but they are mostly for PXI. You can, however, request new shapes.

[eganders]

As a matter of fact, I just talked to Altima (who make NetZoom) this morning.  They have a very interesting product line, but they want about $450 for their stencils.  If I was to do this every day, it would definitely be worth it, but this may be a one-time thing.  I was hoping that someone had done this and had them freely available.  It would be a REAL nice thing for National to have for their customers, since they are the logical source for this type of tool. 

[Dennis_Knutson]

I use it enough for all of the test, telecom, and network equipment that the price was worth it to me. I have no idea if anyone at NI uses Visio but maybe someone from sales or marketing will post here. Exactly which NI components do you need stencils for and what properties do you need? You might want to browse around for some powerpoint presentations or pdf manuals to see what kind of images might be included. It's not that hard to take an image and create a basic stencil.

[eganders]

We are using the PXI 4 & 8 slot chassis and the Compact Rio.  Some of the items are:

PXI-1031, PXI-8196, PXI-7833R, CRIO-9151, PXI-8430/4, 9853, 9401, CRIO-9002, 9401 & CRIO-9101.

I agree that it is not hard to make a stencil of these items, and I am doing it, but they will not have the "intelligence" that someone that really put the time into it could produce.  I just thought it would be nice not to have to reinvent a wheel that is possibly not as good as one that already existed.

It would seem that there would be a strong Visio following in the NI community since they both have similar concepts.  NI is a graphical interface to create instrumentation and Visio has a similar intuitive interface to create drawings and presentations.  I was quite surprised when I kept coming up with nothing in Google searches in the newsgroups.

[minh.tran@ni.com]

Good afternoon eganders,

I asked around in R&D and no one was aware of any Visio stencils for any PXI devices.  I apologize for the inconvenience, if I hear of any through marketing I will let you know.

Sincerely,

Minh Tran

Applications Engineering

National Instruments

[eganders]

Minh,

I would be very interested in any information you can dig up about Visio being used for diagramming NI equipment. 

If you are familiar with Visio and what it can do, maybe you can tell me what the alternative approach to what I am doing might be.  If I was just doing NI equipment only, I guess just using the NI diagrams would be the way to go.  However, the NI equipment represents just part of the system we are building.  We have 6 CAN buses and a number of other pieces of equipment interconnected that we have to represent in an overall system schematic.  Visio seems like the ideal way of easily showing all these pieces of equipment. 

I feel that the NI community should have some of the most innovative people in engineering as members.  I therefore wonder if I am missing something here.  Is there another way people draw up overall system schematics that represent many other pieces of equipment of which NI components are just part of the system?