Creating an exe with 6.1 and VISA

[Baldy]

I'm not using NI488.2. I don't believe it is installed on the run-time machine. I am using these VISA calls with a serial port.

Is there another way to get NI-Spy?

Thanks.

[Steven B]

Hello,

NI-SPY is installed with NI-488.2, NI-CAN, and NI-VISA. There is however a known issue where if you install NI-VISA 3.1, the first time you run the installer NI-SPY doesn't get installed, but if you run the installer again it will install NI-SPY.

Hope this helps!

Regards,
Steven B.
Applications Engineering
National Instruments

[Baldy]

I can't run VISA 3.1 because the target system is W98. I installed VISA 3.0.1 run-time. Is NI-Spy included in the run-time? It doesn't appear on the start menu or in the add/remove programs panel.
-Jim

[Baldy]

OK. I figured out how to install ni-spy on my runtime machine. I captured activity from both machines. The run-time machine had a lot of red. I don't know what it all means. See attached capture files.

thanks.
-Jim

[Baldy]

One thing I notice is that on the target W98 system many of the call durations are 0.000, while on the W2000 system most of them are 0.010 - 0.020. I'm guessing this is just a limitation of the timer function available to W98 on the target system, and that the calls actually do consume some processor time.

I also notice that in the following sequence: viWriteAsync, viWaitOnEvent, viGetAttribute
the W98 system has an extra step "Completing viWriteAsync".

Likewise, in the sequence following viReadAsync, the W98 system has a step "Completing viReadAsync" that does not appear in the W2000 system. This step status is VI_ERROR_ABORT.

OK. So what does this
tell me? How can I fix this to work on the target under W98?

[Steven B]

Hello,

I took a look at your spy captures and I noticed one thing that was interesting to me. I noticed that you are using NI-VISA 2.6 on the development machine and 3.0.1 on the target machine. I was wondering if you could install 3.0.1 on the development machine to see if you start seeing the error on that machine as well. If so, could you post that NI-SPY capture here as well so we can compare spy captures from the same versions of VISA? Your other option could be to use NI-VISA 2.6 on the target machine to see if that works. I'm trying to determine if the problem you are seeing is a difference in VISA versions or not.

Thanks,
Steven B.
Applications
Engineering
National Instruments

[Baldy]

I had started with 2.6 on both machines, then upgraded the W98 machine hoping to fix the problem.

Okay. Now have 3.0.1 installed on W2000 machine. Spy now shows the "completing" steps on this machine, same as on W98 machine. The Completing viReadAsync steps fail with VI_ERROR_IO, but the read operation appears to be successful despite showing an error.

The Completing viReadAsync error on the W98 machine was VI_ERROR_ABORT.

Also note that viWaitOnEvent runs many times on W98 visa 3.0.1, also runs many times on W2000 visa 2.0.6, but only runs once on W2000 visa 3.0.1. When running many times, mostly TMO errors. When running once, always SUCCESS.


Also, how can you tell which version of VISA is running from the spy files? I don't see it in there.

I really appreciate your help.
Jim

[Steven B]

Hello,
Thanks for posting all this information. This does look quite interesting. There are a couple more things that I would be interested in. First off, what happens if you increase your timeout value? I noticed in the SPY capture that you are setting it to a timeout of 130ms. What happens if you increase that timeout value to a larger value? I am just wondering if for some reason this computer is a faster computer and therefore the lower amount of timeout is not enough to allow the completion of acquiring the data.

Another idea I had would be for you to temporarily install LabVIEW on the target system to see if the error goes away sinc
e it is not running in development. This will help to determine if this error is occurring because the system is too fast or if it is some kind of setting that get changed when you running in the environment. This is a really strange problem but hopefully we are getting somewhere.

Another thing for us to check is that you can communicate with your instrument with a VISA Session. For example, if you open up MAX, right click on the port under Device and Interfaces, then select Open VISA session. Now, can you communicate to your instrument with the basic I/O tab with write and read commands? If this works ok but nothing above has, could you try writing a very simple and quick example program in LabVIEW that you can run on the development system that you then bring to the target system that still won't communicate?

I am asking you to try the things from above because after looking through the SPY captures you posted nothings stands out as incorrect. It looks like all the se
ttings are being set correctly, the only difference being that it appears you never get the event on the 98 system.

Let me know what you find out.
Regards,
Steven B.
Applications Engineering
National Instruments

[Baldy]

Thanks again.
Before I got sophisticated with NI-Spy I did experiment with the timeout value, but still could not read any data on the W98 machine (increased timeout to 10 seconds at one point).

Max is not installed on my W98 machine at this time. I tried to communicate using Max on my W2000 machine and couldn't figure it out. I'm pretty sure I'm sending a string, but don't know how to send .

I have also thought of installing the development software on the W98 machine. That may be my next step. I don't know what to do if it works (maybe leave it installed - don't tell).

If you get weekends off, have a good one.
-Jim

[Steven B]

Well, that is interesting. I think the next best step would be to trying installing LabVIEW just to see what behavior you have. I would still like to get to the bottom of the problem, but this would be a good test that would help us to narrow things down more. Also, with regards to MAX, if you install pretty much any National Instruments driver on the target machine it would install MAX (except the VISA runtime engine). If you do get MAX installed, then maybe you could perform a loopback test. Here is a link that talks about loopbask tests as well.

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/conceptd.nsf/webmain/D48BA43C59B60277862569EE000
501FD?opendocument

Regards,
Steven B.
Applications Engineering
National Instruments