Building an Application with Instrument Driver VI's Included

[hkeene]

I have built a VI using the application builder in LabView 6.0.2, but cannot get it to run on the target computer. It includes three subVI's that are instrument drivers for the HP Infiniium scopes. The whole thing works fine on a computer with LabView installed, but displays error 21 saying it cannot find the needed instrument driver VI's on a computer with just the LabView Runtime Engine installed. I've tried compiling with the problematic VI's as dynamic VI's, and with the library they are in as a support file. I have installed the instrument drivers themselves on the target machine and it still errors out. What am I doing wrong?

[Dennis_Knutson]

Are you sure that it's the VIs that are missing and not the VISA drivers? The creation of an .exe should not require specifying the Infinium drivers as dynamic or support files. You do have to install GPIB/VISA separately or make it part of your distribution and make your installer run it.

[hkeene]

Ok. How do I do both of these options. I'm not new to LabView but very new to using it to control GBIP, etc. Do I need to download/install something more than the LabView Runtime Engine on the target machine?

[Dennis_Knutson]

With your GPIB card, you get a CD with NI-488. That has everything you need. The latest version is also available from NI's web site (http://www.ni.com/support/). After the driver is installed for the GPIB card, it needs to be configured before you can use it to communicate with an instrument. I believe the installation instructions are also available at NI's site. You'll need to know the model of the GPIB card.

Since all of my testers run more than one program, I don't include the GPIB drivers with the built application but I believe you could include all the files from the CD as support files and then in the Advanced Installer option, select Run an executable after installation and choose the NI-488 Setup.exe to run.

[hkeene]

First off, thanks for all of your help so far. I guess that I should have been more specific as to the application that I am writing. I have written a VI that uses GPIB commands over the LAN to talk to the Infiniium scope. This takes a software upgrade for the scope from Agilent but works well if LabView is installed of the computer that is running the VI. However I want to run the VI on the scope (they run win98 in the background) or on another target computer and thus want to just install it based on the LabView Runtime Engine. I have installed the needed instrument drivers, the correct Runtime Engine version, and the NI-VISA Runtime drivers. Yet when I try and run the VI on a machine (right now just another computer) without the ful
l version of LabView installed it gives me a load error 21 and says it can't find the VI's associated with the instrument drivers. I've tried including them as dynamic VI's and still it can't find them. So, any ideas?

[Dennis_Knutson]

I'm kinda running out of ideas. You could try changing the application builder settings to "Small target file with external file for subVIs". This will create an llb file that you can open with the Edit VI Library tool and verify that all of the VIs are there. Also, if any of the VIs are called dynamically, you have to take some care about paths.

Maybe you could attach a small example VI that calls one of the drivers and I or someone else could see if we have the same problem.

[hkeene]

Thanks so much for your help. Your replies helped to spark some different thoughts in me about what was happening. I finally figured the whole thing out. I need to install the following to make the whole thing work:
LabView Runtime (I obviously expected this one)
The LabView Instrument Drivers (Again I knew I needed this one)
NI-VISA Runtime (Your suggestion helped me figure out that I needed this to include support for both GPIB and ethernet)
IVI Engine (I didn't think about it at the time but I believe that the instrument drivers need this to work at all and that was the source of the problems that I posted here.)
Anyway if you ever need to make a compiled VI that uses instrument drivers make sure you have this st
uff installed too. Thanks again for your help.