IVI incompatibility between Agilent & National Instruments

[GAINZT]

Agilent provides its own VISA and IVI libraries with their own instrument libraries.
Since VISA and IVI both use standard APIs, we expect those instrument drivers to be compatible between NI and Agilent implementation of VISA and IVI (at least for the standard functions).

Obviously, it doesn't seem to be the case in pratice, except for VISA-C.

The VISA-COM based drivers we've tried do not recognise the NI-VISA implementation of VISA-COM (which is the 2.6 version).

Par ailleurs, NI-MAX ne détecte pas les drivers IVI fournit par Agilent.
Furthermore, it seems that NI-MAX doesn't recognise IVI based drivers which do not use the NI IVI engine.
Is it a true or did we miss a configuration part somewher
e ?
We suppose this is because current implementation of IVI engine doesn't support COM; so the question is : do you expect to support this interface in the near future ?

[Dan_Mondrik]

The VISA COM issue is a bug in NI-VISA 2.6 - there was a set of registry keys that Agilent VISA was looking for but we were not setting. This will be fixed in NI-VISA 3.0, coming out soon.

MAX not configuring IVI COM drivers is probably a separate issue.

Dan Mondrik
Senior Software Engineer, NI-VISA
National Instruments

[gagi1]

Hi GAINZT,

The current IVI configuration utility in MAX doesn't recognize IVI-COM drivers since they do not write entries in the ivi.ini file (data storage file). In the new IVI MAX utility (coming out soon with MAX 3.0), the data storage will be updated to IVI-3.5 Configuration Server specification so it will handle both IVI-C and IVI-COM entries.

Vesna Jadric
Instrument Drivers/IVI
National Instruments

[TheresaUNCCHEM]

I have a Labview program apparently written with IVI drivers in mind for an Agilent oscilloscope. We want to use the same program in a new system with a slightly different version of that scope, but I can't find the new scope's driver files in IVI on NI's website(Plug and Play is available). When I try to get them from Agilent, this NI VISA 2.6 bug doesn't recognize the VISA COM implementation. If the problem should be fixed with NI-VISA 3.0, how do I get that if I have Labview 6? Does NI-VISA 3.0 only work with Labview 7? If we have site license for Labview 7, did it come with the NI_VISA 3.0, because I can't find it. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

[JoshuaP]

If you have a site license for LabVIEW then you have a site license for NI-VISA as well, because NI-VISA is included with the LabVIEW development environment. To get the latest version of NI-VISA, please visit our Drivers and Updates page.

Joshua Prewitt
National Instruments