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GenieTouch Syringe Pump Commands not working in LabVIEW

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I am currently doing research using the GenieTouch Syringe pump by Kent Scientific. I have talked to the company about LabVIEW not working and they weren't very helpful after a certain point. I have attached the Guide and it has the ASCII commands on the last few pages. This is the first time I have ever worked with LabVIEW and I am unsure of alot of the terminology. So here is the problem:

 

I am using the basicserialreadandwrite vi from the examples. I have changed the baud rate to 115200 and a few adjustments, which was told to me by the tech support at Kent Scientific. I downloaded a "Free Serial Port Terminal" to test the commands and all of the commands from the guide worked perfectly. However in LabVIEW the only codes I can get to work are "run\n" and "stop\n". I am unsure what it wrong.

 

What I am wanting is the following: infuse a small amount of water quickly then withdraw the amount after a certain time. This is be integrated in a larger program later but for now I would like this piece of the code to work before moving on.

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Is the "Free Serial Port Terminal" program from Kent?

 

If you can get it to work with Run and Stop, it seems like it should work for the other commands.  Usually the problems with communicating via a virtual RS-232 port relate to the settings and nothign works or everything works.

 

Do you get the power up response or any other response from the device?  Does ?RUN\n work?

 

Lynn

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Yes, the free terminal port is from Kent.

What do you mean by a power up response? The machine would run when RUN\n Run\n run\n were inputted.

I used the buad rate and others settings given by the rep from Kent. One thing I diagreed with was the flow rate he had me set it at zero. Does the flow rate Does have anything to do with the flow of liquid out of the pump?
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In the manual it said something about the pump sending a signal when it was first powered up.  Do you receive that?

 

I am not familiar with that pump but I would think that the flow rate is the amount of liquid the pump moves in the specified time.  He may have just had you set it to zero to start to avoid liquid squirting around if it started at high speed.

 

With a physical serial port there are ways of monitoring the signal, but I do not know of any way to do that with a virtual port over USB.

 

Lynn

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I'm not sure about the signal. When you send the run command, the machine makes a starting up noise but it really just sounds like the motor starting up.

The flow rate option is in the visa command box. It is one of the options close to the baud rate, parity, and other commands.

I'm sorry I am not very good at explaining the problem.

By the way the program will also recognize the Beep 1\n command. And I could enter it as Bee 1 BEEP 1 bee 1 and so I am guessing it isn't case sensitive.
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Solution
Accepted by topic author ThatOneNerd

The manual says it is not case sensitive.

 

That manual is not the best programming manual I have ever seen.

 

Since you are finding that some things work, you probably will need to work through the command set.  Try is as you think the books says it should be. Then try various combinations such as spaces or commas between parameters. \n or \r or \r\n.  The manual mentions all of them as terminations.  It is quite unclear as to which may be preferred. Set up a Read VI which operates in a loop to see what may be being sent back.  The manual indicates that many or maybe all commands generate a response.  It also mentions error messages but does not describe them.

 

While doing this reverse engineering, be systematic and record what you try.  What works and what does not work.  Also make sure you understand how the instrument works manually.  If you send it a command via USB, you want to know how it would have behaved when you told it to do the same thing manually.  If if is the same, then you have identified a command that works.  If it does something different, you need to figure out why.

 

Unfortunately, this type of thing is not something where we can much.  You have to have the device.

 

Good luck.

 

Lynn

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Ok thanks for the help if i run into anything I'll be back.
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Hi,

Disclosure - I sell a software package - SyringePumpPro. It won't help you - it doesn't support the Genie Pump.

 

However, as you might imagine - I have had quite a few hours of debugging pump communications - indeed I have 6 pumps on the bench testing with SyringePumpPro as I type this.

 

To monitor the serial port communications I use Free Serial Port Monitor. This sits between the USB RS232 port and the Windows com port and lets you see what both sides are saying to each other - the pump and SyringePumpPro.

 

I would recommend installing and running FSPM and examining what is being transacted. It really helps!


Tim Burgess
CEO SyringePumpPro
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Email: timb@syringepumppro.com


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