Can't see channels in IVI Scope Soft Front Panel

[Yvos]

Hello,

I have developed a new IVI Scope Class Compliant custom specific driver for a 3rd party digitizer, and wanted to test/use it with the IVI Scope Soft Front Panel (LabVIEW app) supplied by NI in their IVI package.
I believe everything is set properly in the Configuration Store (edited with NI MAX), and I see the call to InitWithOptions with the logical name completing successfully with the correct physical instrument, but the list of channels is always empty (i.e. no channel appears in the box to the right of the display, nor in the Channel Settings dialog). When I try to make an acquisition, the trigger configure function is called with an empty source argument, later causing an access violation in scope.exe and crashing the application.
I have tried setting breakpoints in my driver DLL to diagnose what is happening, and all configurations of physical names and virtual names in the configuration store that I could think of, with no result. How does the IVI Scope Soft Front Panel find out how many channels there are? how does it find out their names? why isn't the API function (prefix)_GetChannelName ever called?

Does anyone know some answers to these questions?
Any help will be greatly appreciated - thanks in advance

Yves Maumary
Acqiris SA

[z_haider]

Yves,

First you need to verify that you have virtual to physical channel mappings defined for your driver session in NI-MAX. To do this, launch NI-MAX and browse to the 'Driver Session' item that is associated with the Logical Name you are using. Click on the 'Virtual Names' tab. If you do not see any items defined there, then you need to create a list of virtual channel names that map to the physical channel names on your device.

z_haider

[Yvos]

Hello z_haider,

Thanks for the reply. I have done that, and added a corresponding physical name in the Instrument Driver Software Modules section. Note that I put the actual channel name as returned by the driver as 'physical name', but was not sure what to put in the 'Repeated Capability Name' column - I just put 'Channel'. But this still wont work.
There is something strange with the General Settings dialog of the Scope.exe: the 'Instrument' drop-down list has 2 entries with the name of my logical name? How is this list built?

Cheers, Yvos

[z_haider]

Yves,

The instrument list on the 'General Settings' tab consists of the logical names that are associated (via a driver session) with a Software Module that has a Published API entry with the following properties:

Name: 'IviScope'

Version: 2.0 or higher

Type: IVI-C

To view the Published APIs, browse to the Software Module item in NI-MAX and click on the 'General' tab.

Could you post more details about what you mean by "But this still wont work". What error code/message is returned by the Soft Front Panel? A screen shot will be helpful.

Thanks,

z_haider

[Yvos]

Hi,

I have 2 logical names (NiSimScope and AqScope) defined which are associated with 2 different driver sessions, which in turn are associated to software modules (my Aq driver module, and the nisScope module in the case of NiSimScope) that publish the IviScope IVI-C API. Thus, I expect 2 entries in the drop-down list of the general settings tab, not 3 (my AqScope appears twice).
What happens is that the Soft Front Panel starts OK, but there are no channels (see attached screenshots). I can change timebase settings ok, but if I try to get an acquisition, the first error to appear is from the call to config trigger, where the Source arg is invalid (the debugger shows that the driver gets call with an empty string as Source). If I try to continue after that message, the program eventually crashes with an access violation in scope.exe.

Thanks, Yves