topic Re: Accessing a 3-axis USB joystick from LabVIEW in LabVIEW

Accessing a 3-axis USB joystick from LabVIEW

zomber — Tue, 19 Nov 2002 01:54:57 GMT

I am trying to access a 3-axis USB joystick from LabVIEW. I see that this issue has been posted before...has anyone come up with a solution?

Re: Accessing a 3-axis USB joystick from LabVIEW

Jeremy Braden — Tue, 19 Nov 2002 17:51:16 GMT

LabVIEW does not have a driver for accessing the usb port. If the manufacturer of your joystick provided a dll for making these calls, your in business. LabVIEW has a call library node for interfacing with external code. The one waring is that you will need to know the parameters that the dll calls require. The manufacurer is the only place for getting this information. As far as configuring the call library node goes, look for a document called "Using External Code in LabVIEW". It if found by opening LabVIEW 6.1 >> help >> search the labview bookshelf.

Re: Accessing a 3-axis USB joystick from LabVIEW

Spaz — Tue, 19 Nov 2002 22:46:23 GMT

Microsoft's DirectX, free via MSDN, is a set of development libraries for high performance games avilable in both a VB and C++ SDK. Input from USB joysticks is supported in the DirectInput portion of the SDK.

The ActiveX object for the VB flavor will NOT work with LV. It initially appears to work. You can make an activeX connection but the input device objects are created dynamically from device enumerations and LV requires objects to be defined at connection time.

However, if you are up to it, (I am severely C syntax challenged), you could probably use the LV call library node along with the C++ SDK to make the DLL calls.

If your budget allows, these guys:
http://www.xon.de/reference/XOnMultimedia/_XmmJoy_VIs.html
sell a DirectX based LV multimedia
toolkit that appears to support Z-axis joysticks. Their website is a little messed up and the German description for the toolkit is coming up on the english side. This link is the english documentation for the toolkit. Maybe if you poke around you can get 100% english. If not you can contact Peter Prinzen [ peter.prinzen@xon.de ]for further info. I think it was $45 USD about 4 months ago. Good Luck.