LabView rte needed for NI serial 1.8?

[menchar]

We're running LabWindows CVI 8.0, with a NI 843x PCI serial board using NI serial 1.8.

Apparently, there's a dependence between NI serial 1.8 and the LabVIEW rte?

We have both LabVIEW rte's 7.0 and 7.1 on the system - when we try to remove either one we get a warning about a dependence by NI serial 1.8.

Do we need both?  Either?  Neither?

Thanks

Menchar

[Anna_M]

Hi Menchar,

Some NI drivers do have dependencies on Run Time Engines, depending on how there were installed.  Was LabVIEW ever installed on that computer - possibly along with the LabVIEW Device Driver CD that includes NI-Serial?  You may want to try uninstalling the LabVIEW Run Time Engines you no longer want on your computer.  Then you can re-install NI-Serial version 1.8.  Doing the installation this way should not install the LabVIEW Run Time Engines.  Hope this helps!

[menchar]

Anna -

I'm still not clear if NI Serial 1.8 uses the LabView rte or not.   Which is it?

And I'm not sure exactly how the LabView rte's are getting installed on our systems - we typically have multiple copies of the LabView rte present.  We don't run LabView and we never will - only LabWindows CVI.

We do install NI Measurement and Automation Explorer - does this use the LabView rte?

We see the NI VISA rte and server also, but we never use VISA.  Can we remove the VISA files and still have CVI (not using VISA), NI Serial 1.8, and Measurement and Automation Explorer 3.1.1 work properly?

We're deploying a CVI application to 15 target systems and it's becoming a mess.    The NI stuff is getting out of hand - we need to be absolutely certain of what we're installing and where it goes and which version is getting used.

Is there anywhere on the NI website where NI portays all of the dependencies between the various NI applications and the ancillary files (rte's, VISA, etc.)?

Thanks,

Menchar

[Anna_M]

Hi Menchar,

If you install NI-Serial with the LabVIEW Device Driver CD, it will have a dependence on the LabVIEW Runtime Engine.  However, if you install NI-Serial from our website here: https://www.ni.com/en/support/downloads/drivers/download.ni-serial.html, it should not be dependent on the LabVIEW RTE (I tried this on one of my machines here).  The NI Measurement & Automation Explorer gets bundled with different drivers, such as NI-VISA, but it is not a separate installation. 

And, NI-Serial requires NI-VISA to run properly.  I am not aware of a page on our website that shows these dependencies, but I think that's a great suggestion.  What I would recommend at this point, would be to go ahead and uninstall the LabVIEW RTE's since you never use them, and then you can install NI-Serial from the linked site above.  Hope this helps!