Serial Communication thru a USB adapter for Mac

[Pluppen]

Dear all
I’ve a serial instrument that I previous communicated with labVIEWSerial.vi in LV 7.0 express and 6.0 running under Wk2. Now I’m trying to make the same instrument work with a mac running LabVIEW 7.1 for Mac OS X. The instrument is connected to a Keyspan serial to USB adapter. According to the Keyspan Serial Assitent the device name is USA19H3b1P1. For further configuration they refer to the device corresponding software. In this case that would be my labVIEW routines.
But I can’t figure out what the port name from the VI should be. I’ve tried ASRL1:INSTR, ASRL2:INSTR, USA19H3b1P1, COM 0. COM 1 etc. When using COM and USA names I get insufficient location info, device might not be present at both VISA read and write. The ASRL 1 and 2 gives me a time out error at VISA read. I’m not even sure if this is the correct way to do this, maybe I should try to talk to the USB port first and “tunnel” the serial devices somehow.
I feel like I’m the only person in the world having to do serial communication with a new mac, it is all so backwards... if anybody has some inputs I would be grateful.

[johnsold]

There are some who use serial through USB on Macs. A recent thread (Feb) on Info-LabVIEW mentioned a couple of people using this. I have not used it on my Macs yet. I do not recall any specifics of what was reuired to connect.

Lynn

[JenK]

Hi Mini M,

I have not personally done what you are trying to do, but I found a link that might help you out. This one is for a USB to Serial adapter, so it is a little different than what you are using, but it talks about needing a driver, which might be the same for your case.

Have you used Measurement and Automation Explorer (MAX) to try to communicate with your serial port? I would suggest trying to open a VISA session in MAX and write and read to your port. Once you can do this successfully you should be able to communicate in LabVIEW. If you are not familiar with how to use MAX, repost and I will walk you through it.

Another thing to try is the serial examples that ship with LabVIEW. You can find them by opening LabVIEW>>Help>>Find Examples, this will launch the NI Example Finder. Go to the search tab and type "serial", this will bring up some serial examples that you can experiment with.

Hope this helps!

JenK

[Pluppen]

Hi JenK and Lynn
Thank you for offering me your help, I really appreciate it!
I was just writing you a carefully description of how and what I’m doing, the different error messages, and when I was going to check the exact error message, it suddenly started to work… I’m not sure why or how, I’ve tested so many different versions, on different machines, with and without Keyspan drivers, I’ve tested different tty and cu binding device names… That i suspect was my problem, naming the port correctly (but then again, at this point I'm totally clueless...)
For the moment I’m going to enjoy that it seems to work, but I might have to write later trying to explain to others that may have similar issues.
Thanks again for the moral support.