500kbps problem of sick lms

[spsuamin]

I've been able to get the SICK LMS 291 working both in LabVIEW and in Matlab. I first did it in Labview. I revamped all the vis' from the example SICK library. I can share the code if your interested.

As for serial/ethernet interface hardware, we used a comtrol device master 500. It converts serial communication (including 500kbps speeds) to ethernet. Really easy to use and simple to setup. Here's a link http://www.comtrol.com/pub/products/category/cid/72

One of the tricky things here is that configuring the Device master 500 for 500kbps means you select 300 bps on the configuration server. Again I can explain more if your interested. 

[RIObotics]

Yes, please do share your revamped SICK code!  This 500kbps problem has been plaguing us for quite some time.  What did you have to change in the LabVIEW code in order to make it work?

As for the Comtrol DM 500, I think I've been somebody mention the 300 baud trick, but didn't really know how to implement it.  We haven't bought one yet, but our local SICK office was gracious enough to let us play with it in their office.  I know the DM 500 has a built-in web server config tool, accessed by http://<IP of DM 500>, just to confirm, are you saying to set this port to RS-422 mode, 300 baud?  On the LabVIEW side, would you also have to specify 300 baud for the VISA configure serial port settings?

Thanks very much for your assistance.  Seeing as how this problem has stumped many people, I think NI ought to put together a KB article for this!

-John

[Brian_Beal]

Keep in mind that you also have to send a command to the unit to tell it to switch to 500k.

[spsuamin]

Here's the example.

There's a subfolder called Examples, in it there is a vi called 

Sick LMS 2xx Series Continuous Data Acquisition TCPIP.vi

It should be working but I haven't used it in awhile so there might be some debugging you have to do. 

Brian is also correct. You have to send a command to the SICK to make it work 500 kbps. I think this functionality is in this vi but I can't remember for sure. There was some remaining work with this application that I didn't get around to but I hope this provides some insight into how I tackled the problem. 

[RIObotics]

Thanks, I'll give it a try, will let you guys know how it goes.

-John

[RIObotics]

Hi all,

The Comtrol 500 device worked like a charm.  We set it to RS-422 mode, 300 baud to make it run at 500kbps.  Although the code that spsuamin attached didn't work right away, we were able to throw something together in LabVIEW to acquire the raw data from the SICK sensor.  Next step is to debug some of the parsing schemes in the LabVIEW instrument driver, and we'll be good to go!  Thanks for your help everyone!

-John