MAX support for legacy motion and vision hardware

[sbvande]

I am updating a ten year old data acquisition computer which ran Windows 95 on a Pentium II processor.  I am updating many of my National Instruments boards and software, but I would like to be able to continue to use a ValuMotion PC-Servo4A board and a PCI-1408 machine vision board.  These boards were used only through the NI Measurement and Automation Explorer which was installed on the Win95 machine.  The original software versions were ValuMotion 5.0.2, NI-IMAQ 1.5 (probably), and MAX 2.1.3.  The new data acquisition computer is XP, with the most recent LabWindows CVI and drivers (NI-IMAQ 3.5.2, MAX 4.0.3.3003).  The ValuMotion 5.0.2 driver was loaded as well.  Windows XP recognized both of these old cards in Device Manager, but MAX does not, regardless of the plug-and-play setting in the computer’s BIOS.  MAX also won’t let me manually add these boards.  I have no need to program these boards in CVI; I only need to do the simple frame grabbing and single axis movement I was able to accomplish with the previous version of MAX.  Is there any way I can do this on this new computer?  Can I have multiple installations of MAX (if the new version of MAX is the problem)?  What is the most recent version of NI-IMAQ which supported the PCI-1408?  It seems like my alternatives at this moment are to have a separate computer running Win95 and old software to do these two simple tasks; to dump all this new NI software and go back to a Win95 system that worked; to spend a few thousand more dollars and replace the fully functional older boards; or to dump both the NI software and hardware and buy someone else’s product instead.  I’m not thrilled by any of these alternatives.  Any help which anyone can give me in making these two boards work in MAX would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

Stuart Van Deusen

[Jochen]

Stuart,

the latest ValueMotion version is 5.0.2 which you are already using. This version is supported on MS operating systems up to Windows 2000. Windows XP is not officially supported.

The PCI-1408 is still supported with the latest driver version (NI-IMAQ 3.5.2) and it should work on Windows XP.

As you won't be able to use the ValueMotion board on Windows XP anyway my recommendation is to use Windows 2000 with NI-IMAQ version 2.5.1.

I hope that helps,

Jochen Klier
National Instruments Germany