04-11-2011 01:59 PM - edited 04-11-2011 02:01 PM
Eric -
Thanks.
The situation is resolved.
We had run NI-DAQ902f0 which installed NI-VISA 4.51 or
we had run NIDAQ861.exe which installed NI-VISA 4.2.
This allowed us to have access to COM1 to control a power supply. (Not knowing anything about VISA.)
When we ran NI-DAQ922 no NI-VISA was installed.
The problem surfaced when cleaning off ALL NI programs, reinstalling the latest version (2010) Runtime and NI-DAQ no longer installed NI-VISA
The solution derived from understanding this has been simply to install NI-VISA (latest version)
There is some disagreement about the validity of what I've just said, but I'm reporting results from Uninstalling EVERYTHING and downloading and installing the selected programs - MANY MANY TIMES in the last 3 weeks - I am not talking theory. If you download the programs as above you will verify what I've said.
04-11-2011 07:32 PM - edited 04-11-2011 07:33 PM
Test Engineering Leader-
I'm sorry you have had such a long issue with the download/install procedure. I think, however, that the behavior you are experiencing is intentional. Many people want specifically and only the DAQmx driver, and so when you install specifically the DAQmx driver on a clean system, it will only put that driver and any necessary components. It seems that the latest driver does not require the VISA component, so it did not install it, although I see how this caused issues since you were using the component that installed with the early versions of DAQ. I think this design choice was made for optimization and efficiency for applications that do not want to have extra components if not necessary.
In the future you may try downloading driver sets instead of particular drivers. This will put on your 'new' system all of the standard driver components so that the hardware should be able to work, and may be less hassle if you go through this procedure again.
04-12-2011 06:40 AM
OK, what we are doing is installing (now):
LVRTE2010std.exe
NIDAQ922f0.exe
visa502runtime.exe
How is that different from a "driver set"?
04-12-2011 09:08 AM
I guess that is a set of drivers, so if that works for your application then there is no problem. If you have issues with finding which driver is appropriate again, then you can try NI System Driver Sets, which are a larger set of drivers for most of the applications you could use with NI products. NI comes out with these sets periodically, so it is a convenient way to get 'all' of the drivers at once.
04-12-2011 09:15 AM
COOL.
That looks like it covers half the world with drivers!
Was not aware of them, Thanks!
04-12-2011 09:24 AM
And to reiterate: DAQmx is not necessary to talk to COM ports. All you had to do was install the LabVIEW RunTime and NI-VISA. That's it. That's assuming you're trying to get a built application running on a different machine. The suggestion of downloading and installing "driver sets" is, in my humble opinion, a waste of time if you just have an application that talks to serial ports. You can create an installer with the Application Builder to include the necessary driver installations.
04-12-2011 10:01 AM
Agree with the minimum that's needed is Runtime and Visa, but Max is such a useful tool we'll contine putting it on.
In our application, putting the driver set on would be done once, where because of changes often made it would be repetative to do anything above the minimum. That is just a matter of programming style - I'm sure that there are other situations where building the installer is a better idea.
04-12-2011 10:59 AM
@Test Engineering Leader wrote:
Agree with the minimum that's needed is Runtime and Visa, but Max is such a useful tool we'll contine putting it on.
NI-VISA installs MAX.
In our application, putting the driver set on would be done once, where because of changes often made it would be repetative to do anything above the minimum. That is just a matter of programming style - I'm sure that there are other situations where building the installer is a better idea.
Building an installer is typically always a better idea. Less things to go wrong. And that has nothing to do with "programming style". That has to do with software distribution, not programming.