Rif.: LabWindows/CVI driver for Rigol DG1022 signal generator

[vix]

I can find drivers for LabVIEW here, but I can't see drivers for LabWindows/CVI.

As an example, Agilent/Keysight 33220A has drivers for both the NI IDEs.

Where can I find drivers for LabWindows/CVI for a Rigol DG1022 signal generator?

[vix]

Can someone from NI answer to this question, please?

[vix]

In the first message I put the wrong link to LabVIEW drivers for Rigol DG1022.

The right link is this one.

[rolfk]

While NI has a instrument driver development team that writes drivers for the most popular devices that are requested by customers, NI can't and doesn't create drivers for every device out there.

They do have an instrument driver developer program where instrument manufacturers and other LabVIEW and/or LabWindows CVI users can submit their drivers they created and after an internal review to make sure the drivers conform to a minimal standard, some of these drivers do get added to the instrument driver library. Rigol being not exactly a high volume instrument manufacturer in the market, I would guess that this driver was not created by the NI team but rather either by a Rigol employee or an end user and then submitted to NI for inclusion in the instrument driver library. As such only drivers that were submitted can be included and if that user happens to be a LabVIEW user, he won't even think about trying to create a LabWindows CVI driver.

So what can you do in this case if a driver is not in the instrument driver list? First you of course should contact the instrument manufacturer. They might have some user submitted drivers that did not meet the NI requirements for an instrument driver to be added in the driver library. Even if they don't it at least tells them that there is such a need and that they might eventually need to think about developing such a driver or work closely with NI to let them do it.

If all else fails you can either start to write your own driver, it's not rocket science, though it can end up in a substantial amount of work if done completely. Or you can find an Alliance member who can do this work for you as a paid job. There is an option to turn the LabVIEW driver into a DLL and call it from LabWindows CVI too. However that require you to have a LabVIEW license in order to create the DLL from the LabVIEW code, and is generally the least preferable choice as such a driver will always require you to have the according LabVIEW runtime engine installed on the target computer, and it is quite a roundabout way to invoke the LabVIEW runtime engine for every call to an instrument function.

[vix]

Thank you very much for your clarification.

I've just searched for Rigol devices in NI Instrument Driver and I see that many of them are supported.

I discovered that DG1022 is quite old and so it's not a problem if the drivers are not available.

Newer models (i.e. DG1000Z and DG4000 series) have drivers both for LabVIEW (with NI Certification) and LabWindows/CVI (not NI-certificated - it can be downloaded from the manufacturer website) .

I'm quite confident that these devices can work with LabVIEW and CVI properly.