VISA Communication with Slot 0 Computer

[MF]

Hello,

I am trying to see if a VXI Computer is up and running and maybe do a few simple commands like DIR and a memory check to perform a self-test on the VXI Computer. This is the hardware I am running with:

(2) VXI Chassis each with an XP OS
(1) Sun Solaris computer using VISA Server commands to interact with instruments in the VXI chassis

So, my main commands are coming from Sun. I can open a VISA session to the PC using something like this as the address:

visa://ip address/VXI0::0::INSTR

But from there, I do not know if commands can be accepted. Any help would be appreciated or if someone has a better way to get info from a remote PC.

THanks,

Michael Froehlich

[craigherdman]

Michael,

I think I need to try and clarify the question a bit. You have two VXI chassis with two VXI controllers. You have a Sun Solaris computer and are using VISA on that machine to send commands to one or both of your VXI controllers.

Now you can't send VISA commands telling the controllers to do anything. Controllers don't act like instruments in the sense that you open a VISA resource and communicate, so looking at the directory structure of the OS on your controller can't be done using VISA. Are these NI controllers by the way?

Craig H.

ps. you will probably have more visibility posting this to the VXI/VME discussion forum, not LabVIEW.

[MF]

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@craig H. wrote:
Michael,

I think I need to try and clarify the question a bit. You have two VXI chassis with two VXI controllers. You have a Sun Solaris computer and are using VISA on that machine to send commands to one or both of your VXI controllers.

Now you can't send VISA commands telling the controllers to do anything. Controllers don't act like instruments in the sense that you open a VISA resource and communicate, so looking at the directory structure of the OS on your controller can't be done using VISA. Are these NI controllers by the way?

Craig H.

ps. you will probably have more visibility posting this to the VXI/VME discussion forum, not LabVIEW.

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Your assumptions are correct. I have 2 VXI chassis with NI VXI PCs in them. I am trying to talk to these controllers/computers without having to use a looping function on the NI VXI PCs. I would like to use the NI VISA server but the only thing I can use that for is finding out all of the devices available on that VXI chassis. I did find a way around this using a TCP listening on the VXI PC and sending a system exec command SYSYTEMINFO and sneding back the information to the SUN but I thought there mught be a cleaner way to do it with NI VISA.

[JohnM 64]

Hi Michael,

Craig is correct about the nature of NI-VISA. It is designed to allow for a common set of functions that can be used to communicate with various types of instruments, such as GPIB, serial, VXI, TCP/IP, and other instruments. However, other operating systems are not generally used as instruments that respond to this type of message-based communication. The TCP and system exec method you are currently using is the best way to do this that currently comes to mind. Anyone else have any suggestions?

john