>>Is there an other way to get the same flow of bits through the RS232 cable as you get from the MAX-reset action?
If you use a serial port monitor program such as Portmon from www.sysinternals.com, you will see that the commands sent by NI-FieldPoint (in MAX) to the FP-1000 are the !Z command. One thing to note is that NI-FieldPoint will send the reset command twice in a row. This is done to account for the case in which the FP-100X may be in watchdog mode or have just been re-booted where the first command is expected to be Power-Up Clear. NI-FieldPoint also sends the Read Firmware Revision command (!e) but this has nothing to do with the module resetting itself.
How did you transmit the command? If the command was addressed to an FP-1000 at address zero it should have been ">00!ZDB[cr]" without the quotes and with [cr] being a carriage return (0x0D). Alternatively, you can use ">00!Z??[cr]" where the checksum is replaced with two question marks directling the FP-1000 to ignore the checksum.
Regards,
Aaron
LabVIEW Champion, CLA, CPI