Does anyone know of a substitute for NI-Device (which was discontinued)

[FreddyBZ]

I'm starting a development for a GPIB and Ethernet (and posibly USB) driven instrument. I was planning to use NI-Device, which seems to have been discontinued. Does anyone know of an alternative third-part package for such a development?

Thanks.

[nayer]

Hello,
You can look at these links GPIB-Ethernet and USB-GPIB, I think this should work for your system.
Good luck !
Regards
Nikhil A

[Dennis_Knutson]

Nikhil,

He's looking for help in creating embedded code in a an instrument and not looking for a controller.

FreddyZ,

It's too bad NI discontinued NI-Device. When we were designing a custom USB instrument, we had looked at using it. I don't know of a direct replacement. If you want to give your instrument a SCPI command interface, you might want to look at JPA-SCPI Parser. There may be other parsers available that you could use. This is just one I had bookmarked when our board was being designed. For USB and Ethernet instruments, you'll also want to look up applicable standards such as USBTMC and VXI-11. VXI-11 doesn't really have anything to do with the VXI bus. It's a TCP/IP Instrument protocol. Both VXI-11 and USBTMC are designed to make instruments with these types of connections, similar to how a GPIB instrument is programmed. Instruments that are VXI-11 and USBTMC compliant will use the same VISA based driver as their GPIB counterpart.

[FreddyBZ]

Nikhil, as Dennis pointed I need softwere for an embedded system implementing an instument, and in any case I need ethernet (and maybe USB) implementation, not a GPIB to ethernet translation (I need the full ethernet speed).

Dennis. Unfortunately the reason I needed NI-Device is not the parser, but to save me from writing the lower level code, to gain at the same time the VX-11 and USBTMC standard compliance, and to have a clean implementation of the GPIB device protocol (I have a GPIB implementation that I did before NI-Device existed, using some of the low level ni488.2 functions and my own parser). Unless I can find (unlikly) a package similar to NI-Device, I'll have to give up on the VXI-11 standard compliance and write something simple using probabliy TCP/IP sockets to implement a simulation of the ni488.2 functions that I'm using (the USB support is not urgent).

By the way, is there any way of getting or buying NI-Device from National Instruments on an as-is base (without support)?

Thanks.

[Dennis_Knutson]

The only other things I can recomend is google and do a search for USBTMC/VXI-11 toolkits and check the embedded firmware boards. The vendor of the USB chips we used provided a tookit that allowed us to make the device appear as a serial connection. Maybe one of the app engineers at Cypress, etc. would be aware of what might be available.