N6700B Low Profile Power Supply driver backward compatibility

[BenoitProvost]

Hi, 

I recently updated the instrument drivers for the Agilent N6700B Low Profile Power Supply on my system. I run LabView 8.2.1. For some reasons, the new LabView VIs all have their VISA Instrument Resource inputs and outputs incompatible with my previous wire and port definitions at the upper VI level. It is not clear right now what exactly is different, but I need to delete the wire and port at the upper VI level and re-create it. Doing this to all my VIs where this driver is used is very time-consuming...  Is this really a backward compatibility issue, and is this known?  Any work-around available?

Unfortunately, I don't know what was the previous version of the whole N6700 driver package.

One thing I noticed and found strange: On a seperate system where the driver wortks fine (which I assume is the older driver), the driver VI's property reports that the revision number is 104. On the newly updated system, the same driver VI's property reports that the revision number is 16. Does that mean that my update was not successful?

Thanks,

  Benoit

[Dennis_Knutson]

You are going to have to show what you mean by different inputs and outputs. The only difference I can remember is with the 'Old' VISA Open and the current VISA Open which changed quite a long time ago. Using the current VISA Open should only affect an 'Initialize' VI which is typically called only once so the change should only take a couple of minutes at most. Post your code please.

p.s. You also posted to the wrong board. This board is for NI power supplies ('Additional NI Products'). You can follow up here but in the future, new questions should go to the Instrument Control board.

[BenoitProvost]

Thanks for the information regarding the wrong discussion board.

The issue appears on all VIs that use the agn6700 driver. In attachment you will find the initialization VI. Here Labview does not complain about the port incompatibility since it was saved from my own PC which does not have the issue. I grabbed a picture from the PC with the issue, and I attached it too.

The input and output ports I was reffering to are the "visa resource name" and "visa resource name out" pins on the VI.

Thanks,

Benoit

[Dennis_Knutson]

The VI, of course opens just fine with the current driver here as well. What you should do is post an original, unmodifed VI. Perhaps it's just a matter of changing the VISA Class.

[BenoitProvost]

I guess that even if I post the original VI, it will still pick up your valid driver and not show the issue...

What you said about "changing the visa class" triggered my attention. How do I do that exactly?

I noticed one difference between the old initialization VI and the new one. When I look at the Context Help for the old one (the one that works fine for me), the resource ports are named "VISA resource name" and "VISA resource name out".

On the other hand, when I look at the Context Help for the new one (the one that has port compatibility issues for me), the resource ports are named "Resource Name" and "Instrument Handle out". Moreover, it says it "Creates a new IVI instrument driver session". It does not mention anything about IVI in the old version.

Is that related with the "Visa Class" you mentionned?

Thanks,

Benoit

[Dennis_Knutson]

It sounds like you actually downloaded an IVI driver instead of a LabVIEW plug and play driver. If you notice on this page, there are two drivers and you should have picked the LabVIEW one. The resource types are obviously different as you have found out. Unless you need to make use of IVI and use the class driver, just stick with LabVIEW.

[BenoitProvost · Accepted solution]

That was the source of the problem. I re-installed the VISA type instead, and not everything works perfectly.

Thank you!

Benoit