National Instruments PXI-8420 interface cards give you connectivity to the many serial devices available for test and measurement, industrial, manufacturing, and laboratory data acquisition. Many applications simply need more serial ports than a standard PC offers. In test and measurement and laboratory applications, many instruments, such as oscilloscopes, multimeters, chromatographs, and spectrometers, use RS-232 for a low-cost connection. In manufacturing applications, devices such as barcode readers and scales also use the serial port for communicating to a host computer.
The PXI 8420 interface card is available with up to 16 ports. These devices can be used as standard serial ports with existing applications or with applications written with NI-VISA.