Error: "BFFF0015 Timeout expired before operation completed."

[rolfk]

Well, there are a few steps from here to follow. First, supposedly there is a driver on the NI site somewhere. Look at it and try to understand what it is doing. There may be a small difference in intialization or such which makes this fail but for the rest the driver may be quite usable.

Then for the communication itself I would configure VISA to use the correct baudrate, data bit number, parity, stop bits, and flow control. Then configure VISA also to terminate on termchar by setting
Message Based Settings->TermChar En to True
Message Based Settings->TermChar to 10 (corresponds to line feed or 0xA)
Serial Settings->ASRL End In to 2

With these settings you should be able to write to the device and when you append carraige return line feed to the end of each command the device will know that the command is finished and that it should perform the apropriate action.

Then calling VISA Read with a high enough number of chars should read the answer. The number of characters to read should be higher than the longest answer you can expect. VISA will automatically return with any string as soon as it sees the line feed termination.

Maybe this together already will work. From the commands I see in your other post I would actually expect that, as it seems a very straightforward protocol. Otherwise you have to try to monitor the actual initialization sequence. This should be possible by getting portmon to start up before the application. If this really doesn't work then the software seems to do some of its own driver hooking which I really daoupt it does, but who knows what developers in the graphic industry are willing to do to satisfy their paranoia. If this really fails you might try with an external serial port monitor. Preferably a real thing if you can find it somewhere in your institute as they are passively listening to both data lines. As a quick fix you can try connecting the RxD line of a PC port to either of the two data line pins on the connection to read the data on each line seperately.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[royne]

Did you ever work out this problem? I am having a hard time connecting to my Olympus BX62 from LV at the moment. Seems to be the same problem described in this post.

Anja

[Kian]

Yup, we managed to solve the issue. I've attached a VI for you to try out. This VI only controls the shutter and filter turret. Give it a shot.

kian

[royne]

Thank you so much!! This saves me days or weeks of work. It seems like the problem was that the actual text commands in the downloaded driver was wrong. Did you get a list of commands from Olympus? I am trying to get some better documentation from them but they are a bit reluctant. If you have a list of commands that I could have I would be forever thankful

🙂 Anja

[Kian]

They couldn't give us a list of commands nor tell us what was wrong. In the end, with help from Dr Berns, we had to troubleshoot the problem, and to come up with the right commands. Because my BX61 does not come with other functions other than the shutter and filter turret controls, we could not test out all the other commands. Hope you are able to do a better job than us.

Good luck.

kian

[royne]

Wow, it's incredible that Olympus provides so little documentation for these expensive microscopes. The shutter and filter turret might be enough for what I need, fortunetaly. Thanks a lot for helping.

Cheers, Anja

[Josh Meisner]

Hi,

This message has helped me out a lot. A final comment is that, after reading the post I downloaded the olympus instrument driver .lld for LV 7 and begin to play with it. I found that all the functions operate correctly, if all the commands are terminated with a carraige return and line feed constants just before inputing into the OLXXX2 Olympus Command.vi (The posted solution for OLXXX2 initiate.vi has this incorporated, but performs the function of OLXXX2 Login.vi). Thank you for providing this forum. I hope this helps.

Josh Meisner
Texas A&M University
Biomedical Engineering
Veterinary Physiology & Pharmacology

[rolfk]

---

@Josh Meisner wrote:

Hi,

This message has helped me out a lot. A final comment is that, after reading the post I downloaded the olympus instrument driver .lld for LV 7 and begin to play with it. I found that all the functions operate correctly, if all the commands are terminated with a carraige return and line feed constants just before inputing into the OLXXX2 Olympus Command.vi (The posted solution for OLXXX2 initiate.vi has this incorporated, but performs the function of OLXXX2 Login.vi). Thank you for providing this forum. I hope this helps.

Josh Meisner
Texas A&M University
Biomedical Engineering
Veterinary Physiology & Pharmacology

---

Since the Carriage Return & Line Feed appending should be done to any command that is sent, it would seem more logical to me to only change the OLXXX2 Olympus Command.vi to append these two chars and just make sure that no part of the instrument driver does append the cr/lf characters already.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[yoli]

I'm having troubles working my Olympus IX81 microscope with LV8.2 . I downloaded the olxxx2 drivers, and repeatedly recieve the above error (BFFF0015) in the VISA read vi.

I've tried to raise the timeout but that doesnt seem to solve the problem. it read here that the VISA must be configured, but i don't know to what values.

Please, i've tried to solve this problem all day, but with no luck.

thanks in advanced.

[Dennis_Knutson]

The first thing I would try is to try Hyperterminal with the scope. If it works, then you know the cable and com port settings is correct. If it doesn't, then either of the two might be wrong. Once you have Hyperterminal working, then you can tackle the driver VIs. Since one of the earlier posts mentions a CR and LF is ncessary, you can modify the Olympus Command function to do this. The Initialize function is setup to only append a LF character.