Installing NI-FGEN on real-time PXI controller

[Jony Hudson]

I'm trying to get started with LabVIEW RT on PXI and have run into a problem that's got me tearing my hair out!

I have a PXIe-8130 controller, in a PXIe-1075 chassis. I've installed the real-time operating system, by booting of a usb stick made with MAX, and have been able to install LabVIEW RT support and drivers (NI-DAQmx, NI-SERIAL) etc remotely using MAX. My various PXI cards show up in MAX under the remote system. So far, all great 🙂

One of my cards is a PXIe-5442 rf generator which I believe to be supported under LabVIEW RT. The problem is, I can't for the life of me figure out how to install NI-FGEN onto the controller! It doesn't show up in the MAX "install software" box that downloads drivers to the PXI controller. As a result my 5442 doesn't show up on the remote system under MAX and I can't use it. I've got the latest version of FGEN installed (2.6) and I selected the real-time option in the installer.

Does anybody have any ideas?  Could it be related to the fact that my system appears with "Model: Generic Desktop PC" in MAX. That seems a little odd to me, but I'm not sure whether it's related.

Thanks in advance to anyone with suggestions 🙂

[John.P]

Hey Jony,

I have been having a look into possible causes of this for you.

Are you using LabVIEW RT 8.6 / 8.6.1 or an older version?

Did you install the F-GEN driver on the host computer before or after installing the RT module?  If you installed the driver before the module the RT support may not have correctly installed.

Have you tried reinstalling the F-GEN driver on the host?

The PXIe-5442 is supported under LabVIEW RT so there should not be any reason for this behavior.

If you can reinstall F-GEN and let me know the version of the RT  module you are using I will continue to look into this for you.

Thanks and kind regards,

John

[Jony Hudson]

Hi John,

 thanks for the suggestions. 

I'm pretty sure I did the install in a sensible order, LabVIEW RT first then all the drivers.  I'm using LabVIEW RT 8.6.

I've tried reinstalling NIDAQ and NI-FGEN and that seems to have done it! I don't know whether it's significant that NI-FGEN was a slightly updated version (2.6.1 vs. 2.6.0, I think) and NI-DAQ was 8.9 rather than 8.8 that I had previously.

Thanks again for your help,

Jony