Using 3rd party VI's with Linx on Raspberry Pi 2

[Ackalap]

Hello all,

I have a Labview 2020 program that used 3rd party VI's to interface with a UV spectrometer via USB. These VI's are provided by the manufacturer (Ocean Insight) of the spectrometer and they work just fine when running the program from a Windows computer. I'd like to make the setup more portable by having the spectrometer connected to a Raspberry Pi 2 and deploying the program to run on it through Linx.

This is proving quite difficult as every attempt to deploy results in this error:

Initializing...
Calculating dependencies...
Checking items for conflicts. This operation could take a while...
Preparing items for download. This operation could take a while...
Deploying raspberrypi(successfully deployed target settings)
Deploying Wrapper_Create.viWrapper_Create.vi loaded with errors on the target and was closed.
Deployment completed with errors

I've tried force recompiling by ctrl+shift clicking the run button and the fix on this thread:

https://www.labviewmakerhub.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=3018

But neither of these have worked for me. If anyone has experience with a setup like this I'd really appreciate some help with it.

[rolfk · Accepted solution]

USB almost certainly means that the driver is actually built using either an ActiveX component, a .Net assembly or a DLL. All three are Windows only and can never be deployed to a Linux target of any form. Without seeing the driver Vis we can't tell you for sure but it's very likely this which causes the problems.

Also while they support also Linux software, they most likely only support Intel x86 and x64 platforms. And the API for their non-Windows platforms can't use ActiveX or .Net, so will need to interface to a shared library .so file instead.

But the killer is likely that a Raspberry Pi uses an ARM CPU, so the Intel x86 or x64 support is worthless for use on this platform.

[Ackalap]

You're quite right the Raspberry Pi is ARM based, I was worried that might be an issue but I was secretly hoping there would be a way around it. Its a pity really, the size of the spectrometer and Raspberry Pi made them an ideal combination for field work.

I'd send in some of the VI's for reference but I'm almost certain that would go against their terms of use. Thank you very much for looking into this for me. Hopefully Ocean Insight will see the merit of adding driver support for this kind of setup in the future.