What happens if you do not have a psisys.ini file?

[Jim Spawton]

Hi,

This is related to my questions from TUE..."How are PXI interrupts handled by VISA??" (posted by Jim Spawton on 7/30/2002)

I am using VISA to try to communicate with a custom cPCI board (not "PXI"), but get failure everytime I "EnableEvent" with "PXI Interrupt" (please see 7/30 posting for more details). I can read/write to board just fine, so I know that the VISA Session works right..

Since it is not "PXI", it does not have a psisys.ini file.. How would that impact my system?? In MAX, I can "see" the board (all info seems to be present), but it reports "unknown" for slot, eventhough it reports it as "PXI1::14::INSTR". How do you generate a pxisys.ini file?? The PXI spec (like most specs) doesn't give muc
h insight into what values you should put in the fields.. Tried "generic" looking psisys.ini (PXI-8171 in PXI-1000 Chassis), but no affect..

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated...

Thanks,
Jim Spawton
Senior Design Engineer
jim.spawton@nokia.com
619.993.4856

[rtamblin]

I do not believe the pixsys.ini file will help your situation, but we can certainly get you set up with one that fits your controller/chassis setup. Typically the pxisys.ini file is only important for our PXI/SCXI combo chassis, and only when the SCXI portion is being controlled via internal backplane routing. We have a table online of the pxisys.ini files for the various controller/chassis setups at:

http://www.ni.com/support/vxi/vxi_perph.htm#pxisys

You can download the appropriate file from here. For more information on the pxisys.ini file, take a look at:

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/websearch/862567530005f09c862566a0005eab87?OpenDocument

Ryan Tamblin
Applications Engineer
National Instruments

[Jim Spawton]

Thanks for the reply Ryan,

But been there, done that.... Did you see my original posting from TUE??

http://exchange.ni.com/servlet/ProcessRequest?RHIVEID=101&RPAGEID=135&HOID=50650000000800000043540000&USEARCHCONTEXT_CATEGORY_0=_200_&USEARCHCONTEXT_CATEGORY_S=0&UCATEGORY_0=_200_&UCATEGORY_S=0

I am really stuck and I have exhausted all options. i have scoured your website and have done internet Google searches, but can't seem to resolve this "simple" issue.. Any comments/hints would be GREATLY appreciated....

Jim

P.S. What does it mean if MAX seems to report the board just fine, but reports "slot unknown"?? Maybe this is the root of my problem...

BOTTOM LINE: Cannot get "IsThisMine" function to respond to my board generating an inte
rrupt, which causes WIN98 to crash. Can disable conflicting device in Control Panel, but can't handle interrupts properly.. H E L P .... S O S.... S O S...

[Dan_Mondrik]

Jim:

This answer is a combination answer for this and your other response. (In the future you can keep replying on the original page where you posted - that way the chain of posts is easier to follow.)

You should be able to use NI-VISA with your device even though it is not PXI. I don't think that this problem should lead you to be concerned about spec violations or anything like that.

The lack of a pxisys.ini file should also not alarm you. You are correct that without it, NI-VISA will report -1 as the slot ID. (In fact NI-VISA 2.x always reports -1 as the slot ID because the slot information is not yet well defined. A solution to that issue is underway in the current PXI spec draft.)

viEnableEvent will fail if the registry key associated with y
our device does not exist. I'd like you to perform these steps:
1) Use regedit, and go to HKLM\SOFTWARE\National Instruments\Common\NI-PAL Database\NI-VXI\PCI. Does the key 16030001 exist? I bet it doesn't. If it does, please dump that set of registry keys and values (under the PCI subkey) and attach it to a response.
2) Delete your device from the Windows device manager, reboot, and then look in the registry again. Is it there? If so, then viEnableEvent should work.
3) If it's not there or if viEnableEvent fails, then look in your windows\inf directory for any other file that contains VEN_1603&DEV_0001. Delete that file (you may have create an earlier version for your device and Windows may still be using it). Then delete your device from the Windows device manager and reboot and try again.

Hopefully this will clear up your situation. By the way, even if the interrupt info exists, MAX will not display it. And the call to viDisableEvent returned a warning (not success)
because the interrupt event was never enabled in the first place.

Dan Mondrik
Senior Software Engineer, NI-VISA
National Instruments

[Jim Spawton]

Sorry, wasn't sure if a reply to an answer would flag as a new question...

Anyway, Dan I really appreciate your assistance, but it looks like I've hit an unscalable wall.... In response to your questions:

1) Key did exist!! (see attached bitmaps - sorry, they are so large!!) Note that I have another board in their too (16030000) but didn't want to muddy up original questions with too many details...

2) Deleted, rebooted and was still in registry, but viEventEnable still won't work (see bitmaps with "FAILURE" in title).

3) Absolutely, 100% positive that an older .inf file does not exist. Verified by deleting .inf files and rebooted. Control Panel then treated my boards as "Unknown Devices", whereby I copied the .inf files back into C
:\windows\inf and rebooted again... The results are what you see in the bitmaps above...

Well, I sure hope you may have some other suggestions, but it sure looks like ALL the pieces are here, but for some obscure reason, the interrupt response capability just doesn't get invoked. Please let me know if there is anything left to do...

Jim

P.S. Had to zip the files..

[Jim Spawton]

For the benefit of those following this thread, this problem was eventually was resolved with several phone conversations and e-mailings with NI software engineers.

It turns out that since I was running LabVIEW 6.0, I needed to install a patch to upgrade VISA to 2.6, which removed the problem. I also needed to install another patch to upgrade LabVIEW to 6.0.2. Once these patches were installed, worked fine with WIN98, 2nd edition.

LabVIEW 6.1 already has these fixes installed..