Soft front panel for IVIdmm in labview

[BillyBag]

Hi,

How do I get the soft front panel to appear when using a IVI driver in Labview. It works a treat when using IVI steps in teststand.

[Dennis_Knutson]

The show front panel is not a property or method of an IVI instrument. NI has created a TestStand IVI Step ActiveX object that is being called in TestStand. This in turn calls properites and methods of an IVI class but the show front panel is unique to TestStand. You could probably use an automation reference in LabVIEW to do something similar but I have not looked at all of the properties and methods or done any experimentation to see exactly how it would be done. Much simpler might be to create your own subVI with the controls/indicators that you want to show. You can make any VI show it's front panel when called by changing it's appearance in the VI properties.

[gagi1]

IVI Soft Front Panels are included in the IVI Driver Toolset: http://www.ni.com/ivi/ivi_prod.htm

In LabVIEW, you can find the IVI Class driver examples using Example Finder (Hardware Input and Output>Instrument Drivers/IVI) or under the following directory:

C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 7.1\examples\instr

Regards,

Vesna

[BillyBag]

Hi Vesna

 I can not find a soft front panel example.

Running the teststand IVI example shows the SFP step in action.

How do I do this in labview?

Ta BB

[Dennis_Knutson]

There is no soft front panel example. Assuming that you've installed the IVI class drivers for LabVIEW, the only examples you have are for the regular class. I didn't know this, but as Vesna mentioned, in order to get the soft front panels, you have to buy the add-on she mentions. If you don't want to do this, you can do like I said and make your own soft panels in LabVIEW or try to duplicate what TestStand is doing with the ActiveX.

[gagi1]

Dennis is right. The IVI Soft Front Panels are included ONLY with the IVI Driver Toolset. They are stand-alone applications and not examples in LabVIEW. However, it seems to me that you already have the IVI Driver Toolset installed on your system since in your another post, you are mentioning using the simulation drivers. The simulation drivers are also ONLY included with the IVI Driver Toolset. Check if you can access the IVI Soft Front Panels from Start>Programs>NI>IVI>IVI Soft Front Panels.

Regards,

Vesna

[BillyBag]

Hi Vesna,

I have the soft front panel applications. I thought test stand was programatically using these. I now think this is not the case. I think that teststand has its own implementation of the soft front panels in custom IVI steps. To use these in labview I need a teststand step context and a step type with the same data as a IVI custom step. After a few days of hacking its all becoming a bit clearer. I now know how to do a few things that I could not do before. For example I think I can now get the step name without having to pass it into labview as a param set to NameOf(Step) (I think i can do this.) I will give it a go.

So I think the answer to "How does Teststand programatically control the soft front panels?" is "It doesn't it has its own implementation."

What confused me is they look very simerlar.

Ta BB