Accessing a PCI Card

[ahmelsayed]

Hello everyone,

I have a PCI DAQ Card and I don't have its PID or VID "It is a General Purpose Card" so Is it possible to access it using LabVIEW? and if i have a handy-made PCI card is it possible to access it using LabVIEW?
could you please help me with that?

Thanks in advance

Ahmed

[Frabto]

Doesn't it has a device driver ?

[rolfk]

Under modern OSes hardware needs to be accessed using device drivers.

There are some workarounds such as using VISA register level access, where VISA itself is the device driver, but that would require you to know the VID and PID of the device, as well as a very detailed register level description of the hardware. And then you have to do a lot of tedious register level accesses using the VISA register access APIs. But if you can't even provide the VID and PID of a hardware it is VERY unlikely that you have the register description available from it.

So the next question is, what does general purpose mean here. It could be that it is general enough that it works with some standard OS drivers out of the box. So what is your device actually?

[ahmelsayed]

Thanks for replying,

my device is a DIY PCI DAQ card "made by hand" but i want to interface it with labVIEW that is why it doesn't have a PID or VID. I read that it will require to write the driver in C library with low level registers and call it in LabVIEW. so i want to know if there is an easy way to it using only LabVIEW.

[rolfk]

It really depends what you consider easy here!

As mentioned the VISA low level register access is possible for plug and play registered hardware in a and that sure beats having to write and debug a kernel mode driver and its associated user space library but easy .....?

But I do not think the hardware management in both BIOS and any modern OS will even attempt to register any PCI hardware without a VID and PID inside the apropriate locations, and as such wouldn't allocated any IO or memory resources for the card. And if the BIOS and OS don't do that you can't later on do it from an application, so the hardware remains simply unaccessible.