VISA information for the NI 1588 card?

[dawilson]

I need to develop some code to capture and retrieve timestamps on the rising edge of the PFI1 input of an NI 1588 card in a remote PC. From the reading I've done so far (forgive me - my experience of this kit is exactly 8 hours old!) and the tools I have available, it seems that using NI-VISA from an ANSI C Windows console application is the easiest way to go. Using the TCPIP example as a starting point, I can connect to the remote instrument and  query various attributes successfully. The problem I have run into now, however, is that I can't find any information on how to control my specific NI 1588 card via VISA. The VISA documentation I've found is all very generic and doesn't mention specifics for particular instruments. Where can I find information on how to set up the measurement scenario I am looking for? I need to set up a trigger, wait for an event, then read the timestamp.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Dave Wilson

[Ted_H]

Hi Dave,

Have you tried using NI-Sync?  NI-Sync is the driver for the NI timing and synchronization boards including the PCI-1588.  Included with the NI-Sync driver is documentation detailing the process of building a C++ application as well as an API function reference.  You can download NI-Sync here  .

The specific functionality you are looking for is provided by the niSync_ReadTriggerTimeStamp function.  With this function you will be able to device (PCI-1588), select the input terminal for trigger, type of edge, and any timeout.  For more information regarding this function, and creating you C application with NI-Sync, check out the NI-Sync User Manual and the NI-Sync API Reference help (both are included when you install NI-Sync).  I hope this helps.

Ted

[dawilson]

Ted,

  Thanks for your help. Yes - I gave up on my "must do this from a remote PC" requirement this morning and switched to NI-Sync. After doing this, it took about an hour to get the tool up and running. I really would still like to know where to find the documentation to do this via VISA, though, since NI-Sync requires that I run my app on the machine which has the PCI 1588 card installed on it which is rather inconvenient.

  Regards,

Dave

[Albert.Geven]

Hi
another maybe useful idea is to use remote desktop or vnc to work via the network on the pc that has the 1588 card.

[dawilson]

Albert,

  Great minds obviously think alike - that's exactly what I am doing 🙂 It's not as clean as writing the tool to run across the network but it accomplishes the same thing and doesn't involve me wasting another day searching for the apparently-missing documentation.

Dave

[Ted_H]

Hi Dave,

I've been looking into this, and unfortunately you can only use the remote VISA server with devices that use VISA calls (serial, GPIB or USB instruments).  The 1588 card uses the NI-Sync driver which does not use VISA calls, and can't be used with remote VISA server.  This explains the lack of documentation.  Remote desktop is definitely a good option for remote control, other options to consider are the VI server with the LabVIEW development environment as well as moving to a real time system.

[dawilson]

Ted,

  Thanks for the clarification. I guess I was thrown off track by the fact that I can successfully connect to the device remotely using viOpen and read/write attributes using both my code and the VISA Interactive Control utility. Obviously, it works just enough to confuse me! 🙂 GIven that my local app run via RNC is working fine, I'll stick with this.

  Regards,

Dave