PXI-1052 not detecting SCXI chassis

[Sara_J]

Full disclosure:  I've submitted a support request on this too, but knowing that it may take some time to go through I thought I'd ping the discussion boards for any ideas people here might have as well.

I have a PXI-1052 PXI/SCXI combo chassis with a PXI-6289 card serving as the SCXI controller. Up to this point, the chassis has been controlled by a PXI-8105 embedded controller running WinXP. We are changing this. The PXI-8105 controller is being removed and instead we will use an MXI card (PXI-8360) to allow us to control the chassis via an external computer running Win7 32-bit.

With the chassis on and connected, using the Win7 computer I can see the PXI slots and the cards in them are correctly identified by model number. However, I cannot see the SCXI portion of the chassis, and when I try to manually add an SCXI chassis I am told that there is no DAQ device installed to serve as the SCXI controller. In addition, the PXI-GPIB card which is also installed is acting a little strangely. It allows me to scan for instruments, and it sees all of my GPIB instruments OK, but I don’t see a GPIB bus defined separately under Devices and Interfaces the way I did on the old controller—the instruments just show up listed under the PXI card.

I have read the Knowledgebase article on auto-detecting SCXI instruments, but it doesn’t seem to offer anything helpful. Everything works fine if I put the old controller back in and use it again, so this isn’t an issue of a bad card/chassis or the wrong card or a blown fuse or SCXI power not being on/set correctly or the DAQ being in the wrong slot. (The ONLY hardware difference is the controller being replaced by MXI; everything else is exactly the same.) All NI software on the Win7 machine is installed and up-to-date, and I even reinstalled everything just to make sure I hadn’t gotten a bad install. It seems to me like it must be either a driver or a configuration issue, but I’ve combed through the Windows Device Manager and the settings for all cards involved and can’t find any differences.

Screen shots attached.  Any ideas?

[LindyHop · Accepted solution]

Hello Sara_J,

I'm going to post to the forums with my suggestions from my email so that if we find the answer it will be available to the community as well.

As long as the 6289 is showing up incorrectly you're not going to be able to use the SCXI side of the chassis. The problem looks like your 6289 is not being associated as a DAQmx device. The alias it has in MAX is showing it as a generic VISA device. You'll have to manually associate the 6289 in device driver. Normally it would show up under Data Acquisition Devices with the NI logo in Device Manager. Since its not showing up correctly it may be located elsewhere, most likely under a PCI Standard PCI-to-PCI bridge (this is how the MXI card looks in Device Manger). 

Once you find it, right click and select Update Driver Software...>>Browse my computer for driver software>>Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer. You should then be able to pick the appropriate driver from the list. 

If this does not fix the issue then I believe there may be a corruption in your installation of DAQmx. You can download the newest version (9.9) here: http://www.ni.com/download/ni-daqmx-9.9/4707/en/ . 

[Sara_J]

Jonathan,

Thank you for the suggestion.  The 6289 was showing up correctly in Device Manager.  I tried updating the driver anyway, but that had no effect.

A corrupt DAQmx installation was one of the first things I suspected, so I'd already tried reinstalling it.  No dice, the problem still persisted.  However, I'd decided that I'd follow any and all suggestions from NI support even if they were things I'd already tried, just in case, so I tried again.  And lo and behold, this time it solved the problem.  I'm not sure why on earth it didn't work before, but at this point I'm just glad to have my system communicating again.

So, to sum up:  The problem appears to have been a corrupt installation of DAQmx, and reinstalling solved the problem.