Varian gas chromatograph communication

[guilio2010]

Currently we have a Varian Gas Chromatograph 450-GC which communicates through ethernet.  I want to use LV to control, log data, etc...however, I don't see any VIs out there to support this.  I haven't done much when it comes to getting external hardware (non-NI) to work with LV and was wondering if:

Has anyone done communication with Varian products before?

If not, where is the best place to begin with this?  Would I have to create a call library node and pull in the drivers, etc?

Thanks,

guilio

[-lucho-]

Hello Guilio 2008,

I do not know if it is done before with the Varian GC450, nevertheless the Ethernet communication is possible,you can use NI-VISA to communicate with Ethernet devices/instruments. Ethernet devices are used within measurement systems for tasks such as general networking and remote data storage. Refer to the NI Developer Zone for information on communicating with Ethernet instruments using NI-VISA.

I read through several pages of the manual of the Varian GC 450, as an advice select a Fixed IP address for the device instead of DHCP.

This should be the starting point for your communication with the device, after communicating and seeing the device on MAX you can use VISA in labview to send commands to the Varian GC450, I would refer to the manual for additional information of the communication of this device.

   Connect Instruments via Ethernet/LAN

Hope this helps, 

Luis Martinez.

Applications Engineer.

National Instruments. 

[guilio2010]

Luis,

Thanks for the info.  The IP address is fixed.  I did start going through the VISA setup, and now I ran into anoth snag.  I tried going through auto and manual of lan instrument and also raw socket.  Nothing seem to detect the GC.  I went into the GC's software and it communicates through there so I don't think there is a communication part and it may be a data entry part either in the LAN device name or port number.  Is there a way to get either of these?  I tried what I have listed it as the LAN device name, and tried reading the manual to see if there is a port and couldn't find anything.

Thanks,

Travis 

[-lucho-]

Hello Guillio 2008,

I apologize for the late response,

 You may want to ensure that the firewall/virus scanner settings are not blocking the connection (the resource will not show up in MAX if the connection is blocked). 

Do you have chance to test this on different computers with a different version of MAX installed it had happened before that the TCP/IP VISA shows with previous/newer versions of MAX than what our customer has depending on the device .

Do you know if this device uses the VXI protocol to communicate via TCP/IP?

Then if you have more than one Network Interface we will need to take a different approach.

Regards, 

Luis A.

National Instruments

[nathand]

Have you investigated whether the Varian software provides an ActiveX or .NET interface that you could use with LabVIEW?  If so, that may be much easier than trying to communicate directly with the instrument yourself.  Years ago I wrote code that talked to a Varian gas chromatography unit (couldn't tell you which model, it was a long time ago) that was driven by CP-Maitre Elite (now obsolete), and it provided an ActiveX interface that I could call from LabVIEW to set sample properties, start a sample, and retrieve the trace and results.