API call - get a measurement/value

[Lars Uffmann]

Rolf Kalbermatter wrote:
> He may be posting to the actual LabVIEW newsgroup. At some point it
> was synchronized with this board. Then that broke. It may have been
> restored but maybe only one way from nntp to this board but not
> backwards.

Exactly that is the case. I wasn't aware of this mirroring function
until Laura kindly pointed it out. I guess this functionality should be
restored to work both ways.


Ravens Fan wrote:
> Why would anyone use a newsgroup?
> Isn't it a lot easier to connect directly through NI.com?

I know I'm starting a debate that I probably better shouldn't, but to
enlighten you: No, it is not easier. Newsgroups work from my newsclient,
which I use all the time anyways.

Many technical groups - one software to access them all, and one
account. Websites = many accounts, many links to remember/bookmark.

If you're serious about the whole thing, newsgroups are the way to go.

Dennis Knutson wrote:
> Have no idea why anyone would use an ordinary newsgroup client.
I think that is part of the problem of Web 2.0 🙂

> Most don't allow you to attach files.
That is merely a matter of configuration - binary or non binary. And
attaching files to newsgroup or forum posts is ususally a bad idea
anyways - just link to the source on the web. The one downside to this
is of course that you need to find a host for self-uploaded files, so I
can see why you find a forum convenient.

And @all: Yes, the mirroring-software did create this "account" here to
mirror my posts. I am not a registered user of this forum, nor do I wish
to sign up unless I really need to, at some point 🙂

Ravens Fan wrote:
> Don't use whatever newsgroup you are using. Just log into NI.com and
> go to Discussion Forums. This is homebase. There are hundreds to
> thousands of messages a week.

Read & understood. I'll use the forums if I have urgent need for an
answer. Or just post to the newsgroup and read responses on the forum,
now that I have the link.

Best Regards & thanks for all answers (which weren't available to me
until now). Btw - I called NI support and they didn't mention anything
about the mirror between forums and newsgroup, so maybe this is
something only semi-official.

Lars

[Edick]

Well, it's likely you (meaning you, collectively) are right, in a couple of respects for certain, first of all in that this probably should be a separate thread rather than riding atop this other one, and additionally in that perhaps there's a different forum.  I lurked on the newsgroup because I had received such poor information from phone and email contacts with NI, and figured their facilities were dedicated to selling their products, whether they'd accomplish what I wanted or not.

Now for a question ... and I'll pose these one at a time ... Is there any way in which LabVIEW, particularly the older version not bound to Win9x, XP, and beyond, can help me with control and monitoring, as well as subsequent processing of events on and data from the GPIB? 

I'm not interested, at this juncture, in simulating anything.  I just want to initialize instruments, monitor and record the resulting events, and subsequently process them into a convenient human-intelligible form.  I'm using mostly 30-year-old TEKTRONIX TM5000-based instruments, though I do have a few newer ones on the same GPIB.  

I'm persuaded that LabVIEW was occasionally involved in preparation of some of our deliverables.  It may in fact have been involved in some of the trials and testing.  I wasn't personally involved in that, and, as things went along so smoothly, I didn't involve myself in fixing what wasn't broken.

Since I've only recently learned of the scope of the forums on NI's site, perhaps there's another one I should follow.

EDick

[rolfk]

This really, really belongs in a new thread. Creating a new thread here on the forum isn't that complicated. Just do a search in the search box at the top with some meaningful search terms and take the time to actually read some of the links you get. If you can't find the answer, chances are high that you did not use the right search terms and you should try at least once more. There are almost half a million posts only in the LabVIEW section of the forum so the chances that someone else hasn't run into your particular problem are usually not so high.

If this still all didn't help you anywhere you can go to the main board of the software you are interested in and in your case this could probably better be the GPIB board than the LabVIEW board since your basic problem is getting the GPIB board working it seems. There you can create a new thread and explain your problems instead of ranting about how bad everything is.

Your problem is not that LabVIEW can't do what you want to do! It can, since I have about almost one and a half decade ago also worked with LabVIEW 5.1 and done GPIB instrument communication. There was no particular magic involved but you have to excuse me for not remembering all the details about this after such a long time. I could most likely work out those details fairly easy but that takes even for a LabVIEW and instrument control veteran like me some time. And I suppose that is how just about anyone else here who has worked with LabVIEW in that time feels. And as we all know, time is money so you're best bet might be to hire a LabVIEW Alliance member in your area who actually has been in the field for some time. Don't get angry if he tells you that LabVIEW 5.1 is ancient and very hard to work with by nowadays standards, because it is. Yes it had Undo, but LabVIEW has come a long way and once you learned to love new features it is quite hard to go back. there is also an issue about relaying on software versions whose lifespan has long ago expired. LabVIEW 5.1 does not run on any recent computer system that is still actively supported with patches and security fixes.So you may have to reconsider your strategy there as well.

[Edick]

What you've said makes considerable sense.  However ... and here's the rub ... some of the equipment used to do some of what we've done in the past, i.e. with v5.1, was, IIRC, used under 16-bit Windows 3.1x, within which one could, if necessary, "talk" directly to hardware plugged into the then-popular ISA bus or the then-commonly used EPP-mode parallel port.  Talking to those devices is a bit more complicated under later versions of 32-bit Windows, since 32-bit Windows doesn't like to let us talk to hardware.

There's also a LabVIEW v7.-something on hand, but I haven't looked at it in detail yet, as I'm persuaded that the older version will "do the job" somewhat better since it can be used with locally generated software to drive custom hardware plugged into either the ISA bus or the parallel port.  Further, I'm persuaded that Labview may not be necessary to do the job, as there are other tools.  The doc's, however, are rather thin, focusing on how do to certain things, yet never making it clear just exactly how one accomplishes the nuts-and-bolts tasks.

What drew me to this thread was the use of an API call to perform a function.  That seemed to me to be the first mention of anything I hoped to accomplish with LabVIEW.

Edick