Mobile Module MMI & VISA (Bluetooth) Management

[Mathieu.]

Hello,

I work as a LabVIEW integrator and for one of my customer I develop application, with maintenance goal for their installation all over the world with RS232 or Bluetooth communication for example, deployed on targets as PDA (PocketPC 2003 & Windows Mobile 6) or Touch Panel (Windows CE 4.2 to 5.0) using LabVIEW 8.6 Mobile Module.

This LabVIEW additonal module works quite well to deploy the same application in this differant targets, but I encountered some problems and I have some suggestions for Mobile Module :

1/ MMI (Man Machine Interface)

      -  for graphics indicators (as Gauge or Slide) graphical object ramp or multi Slider is deleted by LabVIEW when you build an EXE => I think that a graphical objets with all its graphical property could be added in Mobile Module (and works on these all targets). See examples in GraphicalObjects.PNG

      - as I say in my introduction my application is deployed all over the world and usually I used "Caption" dynamic modification for multilingual management for all my controls & indicators. But in mobile module we can't do this (but we can modify dynamically boolean text), so I think that it could be possible.

2/ VISA (& Bluetooth) Management

      -  I think there is a bug with VISA installation. Indeed with the installer you can choose the installation directory (default directory or specific directory : in non volatil memory) but if you don't install VISA support in default directory it doesn't work (with PocketPC 2003 for example) I think that could be resolved

-  As I said in introduction my application could communicate throught different protocols (RS232, Bluetooth) and with LV 8.6 Mobile Module we can now use VISA : great !!!. But in Windows Mobile 6, VISA does not support bluetooth (it seems to have an incompatibility with virtual aliases in the registry) ; and in PocketPC2003 it works very well. I think that could be resolved

[Mathieu.]

I put this post to give solution to use Serial Bluetooth connection with PDA on Windows Mobile 6 (item 2/).

Environment:

LabVIEW 8.6.1f1 with Mobile and Touch Panel Module.

Context :

This application could be deployed on PC with Windows XP, Touch Panel with Windows CE 5.0, PDA with PocketPC2003 or PDA with Windows Mobile6.

This application could communicate with an automaton either RS232 protocol with cable connection (classic) or with Bluetooth connection (configured as serial communication)

=> To allow easy code evolution and maintenance, the RS232 communication is ensured by VISA supported in LV 8.6.1 for all deployment platform : the goal is to avoid specific code to manage R232 communication (cable connection or Bluetooth connection)

Problem :

VISA works very well for all deployment platform except for Windows Mobile 6 (PDA) where is not supported. An known issues has been created in :  VISA 5.1.x Known Issues (http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/13304)

164621 Return

NI-VISA does not recognize Bluetooth devices on Windows Mobile On a Windows Mobile device, Bluetooth devices can act as virtual serial devices, giving them a COM port number. NI-VISA cannot recognize this COM port and gives errors when trying to access it through VISA functions. Workaround: Use the non-NI-VISA Bluetooth VIs. Reported Version: 4.4   Resolved Version: N/A   Added: 08/25/2010

Solution :

To solve this problem, the solution is not to use VISA but use "NI serial" VIs. Indeed, these 'old serial' VIs work equally well with RS232 cable connection or Serial Bluetooth connection.

[Darren]

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