We are looking into the possibility of using LabView to assist in the characterisation of our new analytical instrument. The instrument is based around a PC/104 x86 CPU card mounted onto a large instrumentation motherboard via the ISA edge connector. The PC/104 card runs Windows CE .NET 4.2. We have written a Windows CE driver to communicate with the motherboard. The motherboard provides a number of digital, and analogue, inputs and outputs. Due to the natureof the hardware, these can only be accesed by the driver.
Now, what we want to do is as follows. We would like to use another PC with LabView and a rather fancy PCI I/O card to play (a.k.a. optimise) around with some settings on the instrument. However, we want to do this in
parallel with our existing software on the instrument. Typically, we would use the LabView PC's I/O capabilities to fully characterise certain aspects of our instrument. However, at the same time, we would like to be able to use LabView to read (and perhaps) set) the current I/O parameters managed by the motherboard.
What I envisage is having a small program which communicates with LabView via TCP/UDP/IP sockets and speaks to our motherboard hardware via our device driver. I imagine that this would be supplied as source code and we would compile it, along with our driver API, for our Windows CE instrument. LabView would then connect to this "server" and be able to retrieve (and perhaps set) instrument values in parallel with controlling its own PCI I/O card.
So, my question is. Is this possible? Can we do this "out of the wrapper"? Does NI supply this kind of boilerplate application for customer customisation/ Or is this just not possible?
I look forward to hearing your repli
es.
