VISA driver question

[Alex_Suhisky]

Yeah, that would be fun, but I won't get it 🙂  That stuff is so unbelievably expensive today... 😞
So LV 8.0 is the thing that I am doomed to use 🙂

BTW I still don't know if Runtime will ever work but it works fine on my development system 🙂
Thank you, buddy.

[Gregory]

Hi Alex, is this for a home project? If so you can use the LabVIEW community edition.

If this is for a work project, your company should "splurge" and upgrade your software once in a while 🙂

You could also try finding an older computer with Windows XP on it, but that often leads to many more headaches with not being able to connect to a network and getting drivers for any hardware that was built since XP was deprecated.

[Alex_Suhisky]

it is a work project, but i am working for Government and things like this are very complicated on many levels. Besides somehow about 15 years ago I was switched to a digital telephony and that was last time i used Labview 🙂
Then recently I tried to install new evaluation version and that thing wiped out all my previous installations (LV7, LV 8.1, LV11) AND all the licenses have disappeared from NI License Manager too. I know, no one believes it but it happened to me.
So i found old original CDs for LV 8.0 and went through the pain of installing bits and pieces that would work together  🙂  
And all of a sudden we've got a need for the driver for the instrument and those Perl and Python people are give up and it did not look like a big deal for me so I created a driver and now I am having a million of troubles trying to install it on the user's machine. It is mostly policies troubles but as you can see also technical ones.

Working for Government is not a picnic 🙂

[dkfire · Accepted solution]

Remember to download the correct VISA version for your LabVIEW version. 
The newest version will not support your LabVIEW version. 

Maybe you need  something like version 4.4? :
https://download.ni.com/support/visa/drivers/win32/4.4/ 

You can find many old stuff on the download server if you know where to look 😉

Or maybe you could use version 5.4, by I can't see if that supports your LabVIEW version. 
Just be aware that this is a driver, and installing an old driver on a newer OS might not work. 
And in you case the jump from the OS to the LabVIEW version is really big. 

[rolfk]

---

@dkfire wrote:

Remember to download the correct VISA version for your LabVIEW version. 
The newest version will not support your LabVIEW version. 

---

Actually VISA is a bit of an exception in the NI driver jungle. The VISA interface itself is fully integrated in the LabVIEW kernel and LabVIEW will dynamically link to whatever VISA version is installed on the computer. And since VISA is actually a pretty well defined and published standard, its interface is very stable since the early days of its existence. So the typical NI driver limitation where a driver installer only supports the same LabVIEW version and the 3 previous major versions is not really present here.

Sure there were minor additions and extensions made to VISA in the course of the years and if you develop an application that makes use of such a feature you will not get lucky when installing an older VISA version. On the other side I have never had problems to use VISA even with very old LabVIEW applications and recent VISA installers. This is actually an API that is pretty much living up to the standards what an API should be. A stable, version independent interface that does not require a user to meticulously watch version differences.

Even the other NI drivers are in principle quite binary compatible between versions. But if you need development support (VI libraries to access the actual driver) the installer will only support the same and the three previous LabVIEW versions. I have used built applications with different versions of DAQmx than what was officially supported and that works usually, but NI explicitly does not test any of this nor guarantee that such an application won't eat your hard disk or start singing arias instead of doing the expected measurements.

[Alex_Suhisky]

Thank you, guys, for your suggestions and explanations. The user had a chance to run my executable yesterday and it sounds like everything was working except one last command. I am not completely sure about what happened since the user did not pay attention to the fact if the command was sent, but I could not replicate the problem on my development machine. So it looks to me the unit just ignored it for some reason. I suspect that might be the case that @Knight of NI has mentioned and the version of VISA I installed is "singing arias"  🙂
So, my plan is to get them to try to run it a few more times, paying attention to the messages sent out to the unit and received back. If problem repeats I am going to try to remove v21.5 and install v4.4 instead and play with the thing again, so keep your fingers crossed for me 🙂

Alex.

[rolfk]

Unless you use very obscure attributes or some advanced level control such as direct USB Raw control, it is VERY unlikely that the VISA version is your problem. The chance that your program actually has a bug in handling that command your user noticed not working properly, is almost 100% higher than that! 😁

[Alex_Suhisky]

Gregory, where can I get a community edition? I am fascinated. I would be happy to install it on my personal computer 🙂 I have never heard of that option before.

--------------------------------------------

Never mind, I found it  🙂

Thanks, it was great that you mentioned it!

[Alex_Suhisky]

I cannot believe it myself however installing VISA v4.4 DID fix my problem. Yesterday the customer removed v21.5, installed v4.4 and magic happened. It was all working like a charm. 

So I think I can officially announce  @dkfire a winner. I am going to let them play more with executable to make sure no more surprises are there but for now it looks like v4.4 was a solution. And no, there were nothing obscure, just a regular serial communication.

[Gregory]

---

@Alex_Suhisky wrote:

Gregory, where can I get a community edition? I am fascinated. I would be happy to install it on my personal computer 🙂 I have never heard of that option before.

---

If anyone is interested, it can be found here: https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/labview/select-edition/labview-community-edition.html