PCI-7344 not found in MAX 3.1.1 after installing NI-Motion 7.0

[Jouni]

Hi,

I updated my PCI-7344 + LabView 7.0 system with the newest NI-Motion 7.0. After the update the card was not anymore detected in MAX. There was a "broken" device PCI-7344 under NI Motion Devices, which status said something like "This device has been removed or could not be detected" and the Reset command said something like "Could not communicate with the device. Power cycle the computer..". I removed the device from the "Devices and interfaces" list and since that, MAX hasn't had a clue about the card. I've tried the "Create new.." function, but it doesn't show any NI Motion Devices or PCI-7344 anywhere else. I've also tried the Tools/Install legacy driver support, but MAX only notifies that the updates are OK. I've also tried removing the physical device, starting the computer and MAX, reinstalling the device and restarting MAX, but nothing changes. The device is recognised by BIOS as "Unknown device"; in Windows 2000 Pro, the device is well recognised as National Instruments PCI-7344.

One thing that could cause the problem is that I also have LabView 6i installed on the system, although I'm not currently using it for any purpose. Anyway, this seems to prevent the MAX from detecting the correct updates needed when using the "National Instruments Product Updates.." from Tools menu. Perhaps I need some driver software to correct this problem?

I also tried to uninstall the NI-Motion 7.0 and to install the NI-Motion 6.1.5, but after this, the MAX did not work correctly. For example, none of the branches in the configuration tree would expand and the MAX locked up when trying to use the Create New.. / NI Motion Device. Is there a way to uninstall the NI-Motion 7.0 and to replace it with NI-Motion 6.1.5 without removing all NI software from the system?

Before the update, with NI-Motion 6.1.5, the PCI-7344 card was correctly found in MAX and well usable in LabView 7.0.

[Jochen]

I have experienced almost exactly the same behavior with my PCI-7344. After talking with motion R&D I have installed NI-Motion 6.1.5 on another PC and there the board was detected. I checked the serial number of the board in MAX and found out that it was "0". It looks like there was a number of PCI-7344 boards manufactured without a correct serial number in their EEPROM. I was only able to solve this problem by exchanging the board. NI-Motion 7.0 needs to find a valid serial number in order to detect the board in MAX.

Can you do the same test (NI-Motion 6.1.5 on another PC?). If you find out that the serial number is not correct please contact your local branch for an exchange.

Best regards,

Jochen Klier
National Instruments Germany

[Jouni]

Thousand thanks to you!

I will try this out as soon as possible.

[Jouni]

I managed to get the NI-Motion 6.1.5 and the card working in the same computer by uninstalling all LabView 7.0 related software and then reinstalling everything up to NI-Motion 6.1.5.

The card's serial number is not 0 but something that looks correct. Could I somehow check if the serial number is correct? What else could be causing this problem?

I noted that when I had updated the NI-Motion to 6.1.2, MAX did not yet detect the card but only after I'd installed 6.1.5. Does this mean that after the FirmWare has been updated, no older MAX versions can be used? That is, if I manage to update the FirmWare to the version NI-Motion 7.0 needs, I can not anymore use motion control applications created with LabView 6?

I would very much like to install this update since I'm developing software with LabView 7 and it is most annoying that the FlexMotion VIs are LabView 6 versions. Also I'm planning to use the Find Reference functions instead of the Find Home functions because the old ones seem buggy.

Thanks for any help!

[RManion]

Hi Jouni,

From what I've read here, most likely the problem was not the serial number. Though what Jochen said is entirely correct, your problem may be slightly different.

When you upgrade to a newer firmware, everything should remain completely backwards compatible. For example, if you upgrade to NI Motion 7.0, the driver requires you to also update the firmware. After this has been done, all programs written in Labview 6.x (if you open them in Labview 7) should continue to work. On the other hand, NI Motion 7.0 does not have support for Labview 6.x included, meaning that it will no longer allow you to *program* in LV 6. Though you cannot continue to code in LV6, all of the LV6 programs will work when you open them in Labview 7.

After you have installed NI Motion 7.0, you can update the firmware by going to Measurement and Automation explorer, selecting your motion board, clicking the firmware tab, and clicking the Update Firmware button at the top of the screen. This will download version 7.0 firmware to your motion board. If you for some reason then return to a previous version of NI-Motion, your Motion controller will still work.

If you are coding in LV 7, I would suggest moving to the Motion 7.0 driver and migrating your LV 6 code to LV 7. Having everything on one system certainly makes things easier!

Let me know if you have any other questions,

Robert
Applications Engineering
National Instruments

[Jouni]

Hi Robert, thanks for replying.

I have assumed that the FirmWare versions are backwards compatible, but since NI-Motion 6.1.2 did not work and 6.1.5 did, I become afraid that they aren't. Unfortunately I cannot rule out LV6 to be used with the board some day in the future, so I do not want to do anything permanent to the board that would prevent the usage of LV6.

Right now, with my Win2k + LV6 + LV7 + NI-Motion 6.1.5, I could remove LV6 (if the darn uninstaller worked) no problem, and update to NI-Motion 7.0 if MAX 3.1.1 just found/accepted the board. And since it did not the last time I tried it, I could not update the FirmWare from MAX (yes, I have naturally been forced to do this after every update). So now I'm stuck with 6.1.5. I don't dare to just try the update again, because the last time I had to uninstall and re-install everything before I got the system back working.

So, if anyone has any information about what could cause PCI-7344 to show up with NI-Motion 6.1.5, but not with NI-Motion 7.0, I would be very grateful of all the assistance. Any tips on troubleshooting are also welcome.

Thanks!

[RManion]

Hi Jouni,

I'm very interested to see why the board was not showing up in Motion 7.0. I know that once before I had to reinstall the 7.0 software before it would be recognized in MAX.

In theory, you would only need to reinstall Motion in order to restore from version 7.0 to version 6.1.5. You don't need to remove LabVIEW6 in order to install Motion 7.0, but you will be unable to do Motion programming in LV6.

If the board still is not recognized in MAX after installing Motion 7.0, you might try installing Motion 7.0 and the 7344 on another machine. Are you working in Windows XP?

- Robert

[Jouni]

The system is working quite well right now so I don't dare to just try installing Motion 7.0 again. I really had to uninstall everything LabView 7 related (under National Instruments Software in Control Panel) before I could get back to Motion 6.1.5, because the installers will not overwrite any software that has higher version numbers. When I tried to just remove NI-Motion 7 and MAX 3.1.1, and to reinstall Motion 6.1.2, the MAX that came with 6.1.2 did not work correctly (as you can read from my first post).

My OS is Windows 2000 Professional. The PC with the board installed is under quite heavy use, so testing the board + Motion 7.0 with another computer is not my first choice (but I will do this if I get a suitable PC to use).

Do you happen to know what changes has been made between Motion 6.1.5 and 7.0 in the board recognition routines? Apparently at least there has been added some sort of serial number checking as Jochen said in his reply. I suppose the solution is in those routines, because the board has been found on all the previous versions. I would also like to know if there's a way to check the validity of the board's serial number.

Thanks for your time!

[ChadE]

Jouni,

A valid serial number is any number > 0. If you have multiple boards in you system, they must each have a unique serial number. This would be the case for any board coming out of manufacturing. The board Jochen had probably came from R&D and was a prototype board.

Your problem with downgrading from NI-Motion 7.0 to NI-Motion 6.1.5 was most likely due to the data stored in the MAX database. When you uninstall NI-Motion, the data in the MAX database remains. The NI-Motion 6.1.5 driver would not have been able to read the data correctly. The easiest way to "clear" this database is to delete the c:\Program Files\National Instruments\MAX\data folder. The only other way is to uninstall MAX, which requires that you uninstall everything. WARNING, Deleting the MAX data folder will delete all MAX settings and set them back to defaults for all NI hardware (uninstalling everything has this same affect, by the way). Downgrading is never as clean as upgrading.

The firmware on a Motion board can always be downgraded by forcing the download of firmware files. To do this, select the board in MAX under Devices and Interfaces. Click on the Firmware tab at the bottom on the window. Highlight "PCI-73XX Firmware" by clicking on it once. Right click on one of the items in the "Firmware name" column to the right. Select "Download All Files".

I do not have a good explaination for why NI-Motion 7.0 did not recognize your board. Do you have a second board you can try in the system? If not, could you ask your local sales representative if they have one you borrow for a quick test? Since the board is recognized by Windows 2000 Device Manager, I don't think there is an issue with the board, but it doesn't hurt verify this.

My best guess is that there was a confict during the installation process and your system did not get all of the required files. Though we do significant installer testing, there are rare occasions when a system is in such a state that the installation process does not function as expected. It is my experience that these rare instances do not occur on clean machines, but on machines that have had multiple products installed and uninstalled. If you do get a chance to try NI-Motion 7.0 again you may want to use these parameters to get the installer to create a log of the installation: "c:\setup.exe l*v c:\log.txt". This assumes that the setup.exe is in the c:\ directory. Go to start>>run and type this in without the quotes. The log file will be named log.txt in the c:\ directory.

Finally, you can technically use NI-Motion 7.0 in LabVIEW 6. You just need to copy the C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 7.0\vi.lib\Motion folder to the vi.lib folder of LabVIEW 6. Though this is not officially supported, there is no reason it shouldn't work.

Regards,