Control VXI Register Based Cards via GPIB-VXI/C in LabVIEW 2017

[slambert]

Hi All,

I am currently trying to upgrade an old Win7/LabVIEW2009 computer system to Win10/LabVIEW2017.  MAX is finding my E8404 VXI chassis and show a "GPIB-VXI" card as "GPIB0:1:0:INST".  This is different from the old "GPIB-VXI0:1:INST" resource ID.  My problem is none of the other VXI cards in the chassis appear in MAX.

I have installed NI-VISA and NI-VXI (latest versions for Win10).  How can I get MAX to recognize the rest of my VXI cards and allow the NI-VISA routines to perform register level access?

Any ideas?

[Princealimagicalhe]

Slambert,

This is Ali from National Instruments.

 A few things that came into mind: 

- Is this VXI chassis NI based or third party?

- Is the VXI recognized by both Device Manager and MAX (I can't imagine that not being the case)?

- What type of cards are you running? 

[slambert]

Hi Ali,

The VXI chassis is an Agilent E8404 with an NI VXI-GPIB/C as the slot zero controller.

MAX 17.0 is finding a "GPIB-VXI" instrument as "GPIB0::1::0::INSTR" and the chassis as "GPIB0::1::28::INSTR".  What I don't see in MAX is any of the register based VXI cards in the other slots of the chassis.  They used to be "GPIB-VXI0::2::INSTR" where the "2" was the VXI logical address.

In the older MAX, you added a device of type "GPIB-VXI", but that option doesn't appear to be in version 17.  MAX automatically finds the GPIB-VXI/C card, but doesn't appear to query the resource manager and find the VXI cards.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Steve

[Princealimagicalhe]

Steve,

 There are a few ways this approach could go. It is a little harder to diagnose since it is not an NI supported chassis so we wouldn't be able to confirm either way.

Do you have an NI VXI chassis and could test the controller with that set up?

[slambert]

Ali,

Sorry, but no.  I only have the Agilent chassis available.

I just found a note in the NI-VISA 17.0 readme file that states "Dropped support for GPIB-VXI controllers".  Would going back to NI-VISA 16.0 maybe help?

Steve

[AgentAstronaut]

Hi Steve,

That is an excellent idea. As you probably know, the latest version of NI-VXI does not support GPIB-VXI controllers. They are instead controlled through NI-VISA (Or old version of NI-VXI).

Cheers,

Michael

[slambert]

I'm not having much luck.  To install NI-VISA 16.0 and NI-VXI 16.0, I also had to install MAX 16.0 to get everything to "work".  I could see the register based devices under the GPIB-VXI device.  However,  LabVIEW 2017 will not let me run with MAX 16.0 installed.

So they question is still "how do I get GPIB-VXI cards and their associated register based VXI cards to show up in LabVIEW 2017?"

Steve

[Case_in_Point]

What do you mean by "LabVIEW won't allow me to run with MAX 16.0 installed"? Are you getting some error or incompatibility or something within LabVIEW?

Cason

NI Applications Engr.

[slambert]

I found that I could see the VXI instruments when I loaded NI-VISA 16.0 and MAX 16.0 both.  When I try to load LabVIEW 2017 after that, LabVIEW 2017 will not allow me de-select MAX 17.0 from the install.  So I can't find a way to use LabVIEW 2017 with MAX 16.

Steve

[Princealimagicalhe]

Steve,

 We might be at a standstill since LabVIEW 2017 does require the latest version of MAX. I did find the documentation below that might allow us to install LabVIEW without the newest MAX but it does not have a 100% success rate.

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/How-to-build-a-Labview-Installer-without-MAX/td-p/599673