LabVIEW
NI MAX does not recognize my device connected via USB
Hello again,
when I try out NI-VISA Driver Wizard. I got this problem (see picture):
Does anyone knowes this failure? My USB is recognized, but still I got a failure, when I click next step.
Lovely regards
NI Max and NI-VISA can not recognize arbitrary USB devices. A USB device can be many things, like a keyboard, mouse, a serial port, a webcam, an oscilloscope, a headphone or a zillion other things. Each of these has a different protocol that is talked over the USB bus.
NI-VISA only understands USB devices that talk USB-TMC (Test and Measurement Class) a specific USB protocol developed for test instruments.
It also can use USB-VCP devices, that are devices that work like a serial port, but it doesn't do that itself but relies on the underlaying OS to provide these devices as a normal serial port through the OS API.
It also has support for USB Raw, which is a mode where you register a specific device to be directed to NI-VISA and the raw data from the device is simply handed to the VISA client and it has to send raw data back. This means that you need to implement the ENTIRE USB protocol yourself in your LabVIEW VIs. This is only an option if the manufacturer of the device provides a detailed low level USB protocol specification, which most won't do. Even if one does it's a pain in the a** to develop such a driver as you have to deal with all kind of low level details for binary data, bit shuffling and many more such things.
The USB Driver Wizard is used to designate a USB device as USB Raw device in NI-VISA. It''s the first (very tiny) step to talk with an arbitrary USB device through VISA. After that you have to develop the actual driver which requires the very detailed protocol specification for the device. Unless you have real experience with developing USB devices on embedded hardware or similar, you absolutely surely are not wanting to go down this path! Aside of that I haven't heard that Thorlabs ever shared their protocol specification with anyone, and without such a specification it's simply impossible to develop such a driver.
The Thorlabs software certainly installed a device driver and most likely uses a DLL or the aforementioned ActiveX component to access that driver. This is the only feasable way to access this hardware. The APT software driver was not developed to be usable through NI-VISA and NI-VISA can't access arbitrary drivers.
