Introduction Making the hardware connection and control is the first step toward mastering the whole connectivity challenge. With instrument connectivity standards such as the general-purpose interface bus (GPIB), universal serial bus (USB), local area network (LAN), and LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation (LXI), developers face the challenge of integrating these instrument connectivity standards into their systems. This is particularly true when instruments and connectivity hardware are from various suppliers, resulting in hardware driver incompatibility.