Visio Stencil for National Instruments components

[eganders]

I would be very interested in any information someone here can dig up
about Visio being used for diagramming National Instruments equipment
such as PXI chassis, Compact Rio and their associated components..

I have looked pretty widely (even at the NI site) and have found very
little on the subject. There is a company that makes the stencils, but
they want $450 for a year's subscription. Maybe someone here 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.

Sure I can (an am) creating my own stencils, but if someone has made
them already, It would be nice to not reinvent them.

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?

 

[Chris Roth [MVP]]

You can always start with just boxes and text. You can also drag bitmaps off
of a web page straight into Visio (ie: from Google Images).

And of course, you can make your own shapes.

I don't know anything about NI, but if this is something you're using
frequently in your job, the $450 might not be such a bad deal, once you
consider how many days it will take you to create everything yourself.

But I wish you luck in perhaps building a community. I wonder if shape
libraries can flourish up on SourceForge or GotDotNet or some other
open-source development site?

Cheers,

--

Chris Roth
Visio MVP

www.wanderkind.com/visio