Thorlabs Power Meter: Not recognised in LabVIEW

[K.Ellis]

Hello All,

I've been trying to make a LabVIEW 17 VI for the Thorlabs PM101A (with S150C detector) optical power meter.

I have installed all the recommended drivers and downloaded the Thorlabs 'Optical Power Monitor' software. The power meter is detected and functions correctly with this software, however when I try to make a VI for this equipment I cant even get passed the first stage - locating the resource name.

As the screenshots below demonstrate, the devices are present in device manager but nothing appears on labVIEW.

I've seen someone else have a similar problem with a different piece of equipment and it was based around the devices being under the wrong section of device manager. I don't fully understand this issue and cant seem to resolve it.

Any suggestions on what to do would be great.

Thanks for your time,

K

[Martin_Henz]

Agrrr.... is this any of the USB devices? Thorlabs uses USB RAW and all I see here for another Thorlabs device, there is no exact information of the VISA resource name in the PDF documentation. I don't know from wich source we got the correct resource name. Maybe there is some printed information - otherwise: call Thorlabs service.

[RTSLVU]

While I have never used that instrument I had something similar happen a long time ago with a Yokogawa power analyzer.

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Yokogawa-WT500-through-USB/m-p/1038812

In a nutshell you might have installed the Thorlabs driver incorrectly.

The USB drivers must be installed as a "USB Test and Measurement Device" not the native "Thorlabs USB device" for VISA and Measurement & Automation Explorer to see it.

In my case: Now in Windows Device Manager it shows up under USB Test and Measurement Devices where before it showed up as Yokagowa USB Device.

[cstorey]

Make sure you have the right driver installed for the PM you have.  ThorLabs updated their drivers recently, and provided a driver Switcher application. 

You can get all their driver software here - See: https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=9005

Are you using the sample LabVIEW code they provided?  Mine is located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Thorlabs\PowerMeters\LabView\LabView 32 bit\TLPM\TLPM.llb.  

If you don't have their LabVIEW example and driver installed, then re-run the power meter intstaller and "select modify", then select all the options available for install.  I think by default it does not install any of the C/python/LabVIEW examples.

If you had an older power meter then that software used a PM100D.dll and the newer software uses a TLPM_*.dll.  So you would need to install the newer version to use these examples.  See section 7 of the manual - https://www.thorlabs.com/software/MUC/OPM/v2.2/TL_OPM_V2.2_web-secured.pdf

Run the LabVIEW sample from the - C:\Program Files (x86)\Thorlabs\PowerMeters\LabView\LabView 32 bit\TLPM\TLPM.llb and post the error message you get if that doesn't work.

Cheers

Craig

[SuperDuperCooper]

I had the same problem (I think) ... I could see the meter fine in the windows software but the simple LabVIEW example supplied by ThorLabs in the .llb ('Measure Power Sample.vi') would not work.

The solution was to switch the driver.

In the 'Optical Power Monitor' software go to Help => Tools => Driver Switcher. I set the PM101 over to use 'TLPM (libusb)' driver and it worked fine in LabVIEW.

You will need Windows admin rights.

Cheers