Troubleshooting TEAC XR-7000 Drivers

[Milon]

Hello all,

I'm bringing this topic from another thread.

Background:  We have an old TEAC XR-7000 Data recorder that we want to be able to control easily using LabVIEW, and we don't have a lot of LabVIEW expertise in house.

We have the control manual for the GPIB board on the recorder.  The recorder is linked to the computer via a NI GPIB-USB-HS controller cable.

We can write commands using a simple VISA setup - Open - Write - Read - Close.  The device responds correctly.

Drivers exist for the device.  They are old LabWindows/CVI drivers.  We attempted to convert the drivers into LabVIEW drivers using the driver conversion utility - the software based converter, not by hand.  The converter errored out when trying to convert the front panel.

We had help from Oswald Branford here on the boards in converting the drivers.  I have attached the converted library he helped us with.

The Problem:So far we haven't had any luck with the drivers themselves although they look like they're sending the correct codes.  It appears that the initialization code is starting things incorrectly, but it's hard to troubleshoot.

At this point I can't really detail the exact question we need answered - I'm looking for some insight on how to go about troubleshooting these drivers at all.  If anyone could maybe take a look at the drivers and give us some direction we'd be very thankful.

All for now...

[NathanT]

Hello Milon,

       Thank you for starting a new thread to address the troubleshooting of the converted LabVIEW wrapper.  I am happy to hear that you can use the VISA functions sucessfully in LabVIEW.  Debugging a wrapper can be troublesome if you don't have an appropriate text-based ADE for the original source code (LabWindows/CVI, etc...).  Because the driver is 15 years old and not supported, I have two recommended options for you:

1.  Download (or use a copy if you already have one) LabWindows/CVI and try using the original driver directly, not through the wrapper.  See if the problems persist, find out what is causing them and fix them, and then submit the fixes to instrument.drivers@ni.com.

2.  Implement what you need in a new native LabVIEW driver.  You only need to implmement the functions that you need. The original driver does not have that many functions, and has a lot of the string formatting already figured out.  This could probably be done in a couple solid days of development and testing and you would have a much more usable driver to extend and maintain in the future.

Let us know what you think.

Cheers,

NathanT