LabVIEW low level Ethernet communication, 802.3 physical layer

[Larry Junek]

I'm trying to use LabVIEW to establish communications with a Freescale 8270 PowerPC CPU with built-in 802.3 Ethernet. The microcode on the CPU end supports only the 802.3 MAC/PHY layer (with CSMA/CD). We will not be implementing a TCP or UDP stack in the CPU code. It appears that the built-in LabVIEW functions communicates with Ethernet through the TCP and UDP stacks only, which in turn call the windows API. LabVIEW does not access the Ethernet 802.3 physical layer directly at all. So, there is a gap in the communications between the two. I do not need a lot of networking functionality, this is only for a simple continuity test (CPU sends a test message, LabVIEW displays it).  Any LabVIEW code examples or app notes would be helpful. Thank You, Larry Junek (larry4882@yahoo.com)

[NIJanell]

Hello Larry,

Although there is no true way to do this in just LabVIEW, but you can do it with some 3rd party products.  The following devzone article and example codes do discuss the issue.

Ethernet Packet Sniffer Utility Using WinPcap Functions

Please note that NI Engineers can only address questions on how to call external code from LabVIEW, not the contents of each call demonstrated in this example. In addition, we cannot guarantee that the software will work with newer versions of the external software package, but this should give you a start.

Have a great day,

Janell Rodriguez | Applications Engineer | National Instruments