Third party driver installation in cRIO

[Michele-Icing]

Dear Community,

unfortunatelly previous posts on this topic did not help so I am making this new thread. 

I am trying to communicate with a USB device using my cRIO-9203. The USB device needs the CP2102 USB to UART Bridge control drivers to operate (also in attachment). Notice that my VI works on the host computer once I install such drivers. In the host (Windows), once the drivers are installed I have no problem in communicating with the device using the basic VISA architecture. So the VI or the communication with the device are not issues here.

Now I would like to communicate to this device via the USB port in the cRIO. I can see both in NI MAX and in the Linux System Configurator that the device is recognised. 

The question is: how do I install the drivers in the cRIO?

I tried using the automatic driver search that is possible in the project/vi, but this drivers are not recognised in the search. Somehow, I need to open this exe file in the cRIO (e.g. via the system configurator or via the MAX) or if someone can show me how to make an operating library using the provided dll and sys files that might also be an option (but I have never done it or have experience with that in practice).

Thanks 

[rolfk · Accepted solution]

The Linux kernel since a long time comes with support for most popular USB-RS-232/485 interfaces. This includes pretty much all FTDI devices but also the CP2102. Unless you use a very old version of LabVIEW (and accordingly NI Linux RT on that controller) it should be automatically supported.

However what is RIO-9203? The NI-9203 is a C series analog input module. Do you mean a cRIO-9023? Because if you do you are out of luck. This controller uses VxWorks. Not only are there no drivers for tall these USB serial interfaces for VxWorks, but NI has discontinued support for VxWorks with recent LabVIEW versions.

[Michele-Icing]

Dear @rolfk,

thanks for your reply. In fact I have two RIO systems with me. The NI 9023 has indeed the VxWorks OS, so I gave up on it. The second one, the NI 9068, is Linux based. You are right, the Linux OS should support my application without need of installing additional drivers. However, I am yet not able to communicate with the device. I will try with a RS232 to RS 485 adaptor between the device and the port on the RIO chassis. Hopefully this will solve the problem.