SoftMotion Drive Interface (SDI) Plug-in Feature Compatibility with third party motor/driver

[tsaha263]

I am a graduate student currently developing an RT setup where I need a servo and driver. I’m considering buying a servo from a renowned brand (Sanyo Denki, Mitsubishi, Parker). However, the SDI plugin is only available for 32-bit LabVIEW. Can anyone confirm if a 64-bit plugin is available?

I am using LabVIEW 2022, and all the SDI plugins I’ve found are for 32-bit. I have contacted the motor company as well, but I haven’t received any reply yet. I’m also attaching all the pictures.

[rolfk]

SoftMotion has been discontinued by NI after LabVIEW 2020. From this page: https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z0000015CT9SAM

LabVIEW SoftMotion is no longer supported as of June, 2021. If you are designing a complex motion system, NI recommends considering an NI Partner or other third-party motion integrators to better assess application needs and solutions. Some possible alternatives are listed below.

Recommended Alternatives

• Use third-party controllers that can interface with NI products via serial or ethernet:
  • Serial control with a LabVIEW API
  • Serial control without a LabVIEW API
• Use NI Digital I/O C Series modules and create all motion control code for use on an FPGA
• Use EtherCAT drives with the NI Industrial Communications for EtherCAT driver instead of SoftMotion. This method would use the controller's EtherCAT command set to program the controller rather than SoftMotion axis and commands.

Note: an NI Partner is a business entity independent from NI and has no agency or joint-venture relationship and does not form part of any business associations with NI.

[tsaha263]

I am not talking about soft motion. I am talking about SDI plugin which is only available in 32-bit. At least that I found. I need 64bit.

[rolfk · Accepted solution]

Yes you did ask about SDI modules only being 32-bit and also mentioned using LabVIEW 2022. I just wanted to point out that SoftMotion, which AFAIK is required to use SDI modules has been discontinued in July 2021 and the latest release is 2020 and for LabVIEW 2020. Use in newer LabVIEW versions may be possible but is unsupported.

That all said NI stopped investing into motion hardware somewhere before 2015 and deprioritized SoftMotion shortly after that. No new developments were done and that was before any of the Toolkits except Vision were recompiled for 64-bits. The first version of SoftMotion released for both 32-bit and 64-bit was 2020, but at that time NI had already stopped several years to invest into new developments for anything that had to do with motion. And since most SDI modules were in fact released by NI themselves, none of them was rereleased for additional 64-bit support. Any module provided by a third party was even more unlikely to be updated, since the signs on the horizon that NI was abandoning motion altogether were pretty obvious for several years already.