Vishay SensorXplorer board communication issue

[alex_b2]

Firstly, I am a beginner and have been given a task that I probably am not equiped for, but I have to do it.

I have the following devices connected to my laptop via USB:

           vishay sensor explorer board (Rev4) and their proximity sensor  VCNL4030X01. see here SensorXplorer™ (vishay.com)

It uses I2C communication and I have decided to use VISA to communicate with it...

The first problem is that labview doesn't see the device at a com port, but Windows does.... Windows sees it as HID on Device Manager.  This is what happens when I disconnect...It was the only way to verify Windows sees it..

So how do I get Labview to see this device? Do I have to give it that long location number given in device manager?

Thanks for any guidance.

Alex

[Albert.Geven]

Hi

Deep down in the manual yuo mentioned I found some remarks about installing dll's for LabVIEW.

Did you install these?

They mention LabVIEW 20123 but probably it also works for newer versions.

[alex_b2]

page: of manual

My understanding is that the xplorer board installation installs Labview Runtime Engine and a few dlls in a particular path and nothing more.

The second stage is to download the GUI (VCNL4030X01_Xplorer_v1_4_1.exe), which is specific to a particular sensor (VCNL4030X01), then this references the files installed in the xplorer board installation. The exe obviously can't be opened and there are no VI's to program with... 😞

To answer you question: I have installed everything and the GUI works fine.

Now I need to control it with Labview and I don't know how.. 🙂

Thanks

Alex

[rolfk]

This definitely looks like a LabVIEW application. To bad they won't allow you to get the source code for it.

Without direct support from Vishay however it is very unlikely that you can get this working from LabVIEW. The board uses the FTDI FT260 chip. FTDI does provide a library in the form of a DLL that lets you interface to this chip. So you could use the Call Library Node to call the functions in that library, but that still doesn't really get you anywhere and is anything but trivial to do already. You then need to read the electrical schemata in the manual to determine how the sensors are attached to the FT260. You then need to use information from the datasheets of FTDI and Vishay to control the sensors correctly.

It's not impossible but its a major project in itself and requires quite a bit of experience and knowledge.