Did anybody have chance to control Turbo-V 550?

[Coop]

Any getting started LabVIEW drivers for Pump Controller Turbo-V 550 from Varian?

Thanks

[ColinAE]

Hello Coop!

I have searched both our databases and the Varian INC. website for any information about a LabVIEW instrument driver for your pump controller, and I unfortunately came up with nothing.

Sometimes it is a good idea to contact the manufacturer (Varian)directly to see if they have any LabVIEW code written!

Sorry I came up with nothing!
Regards,
Colin C.
Applications Engineering

[thehobbs]

I did some looking on the internet and was able to find one manual for the V550, however it did not include any programming information other than setting up the serial port. It appears that it should not be too difficult to communicate with the instrument via VISA Writes and Reads or the Instrument I/O Assistant in LabVIEW 7.0 or later. Contact the vendor and see if they can supply you with the instrument command set. I would be happy to help further at that point. You can then share your driver with the LabVIEW community by submitting it to the Instrument Driver Network (ni.com/idnet).

Jason Hobbs
Instrument Drivers

[Coop]

Hi Jason,

I do have the manual for this pump controller which includes few sections about command syntax.
I wanted to ask you few questions regarding command syntax.

The message format is given in the manual as:

++++++

For each command I am given a table specifying what the each bracket section of this string should be.
STX and ADDR for example are always the same and given as 0x02 and 0x80.
I was wondering if 0x in front stands for hex format?
In other words if I know all the numbers for each part of the string what would be the format I send to the VISA write?
I am given example for command START and it is given in the table:

(02) (80) (30 30 30) (31) (31) (03) (42 33) - I added the brackets to delim
it the sections
++++++

Do I convert this to hex first before passing it to VISA write? Do pluses represent spaces?
The part is obtained by XORing all of the characters subsequent to and including the terminator. The value is hexadecimal coded and indicated by two ASCII character.
The example has 42 33 for CRC see above.
I tried XORing just numbers in (02 80 30 ...so on) and I don't get right numbers.
Do I need to convert it before?

Thanks,
Pedja

[thehobbs]

Pedja,
These numbers are hex representations, and should be written that way to a VISA Write. Make sure to use hex display on the string you wire into the VISA write. I don't think that pluses represent spaces; I think they basically are just telling you to combine the various hex numbers into one long hex number string. After a little time (communication with this instrument is not user friendly), I think I have derived how you can determine the CRC XOR'd value. See the attached screenshot. Basically, I wire the various hex components in the above string to a Compound Arithmetic function in LabVIEW set to XOR. For the above case, it gives you a result that you can view in hex as "B3". Now, considering "B3" as an ASCII "B" and a
n ASCII "3", you can convert these ASCII characters back to hex (ASCII B = hex 42; ASCII 3 = hex 33) and you will see that the match the numbers you provide above for CRC. You should be able to adapt my code to programmatically derive the CRC for any possible type of command you send. You could have a special subVI that does this. Let me know how everything goes and I look forward to you submitting your code to IDNet at http://zone.ni.com/idnet97.nsf/instrumentdriversubmit.

Good Luck.
Hobbs