Hi Chris,
If your goal is to create an interchangeable application, you do have to use a class driver. National Instruments provides Measurement and Automation Explorer (MAX), a Graphical User Interface for configuring IVI. MAX is usually installed with one of NI's Application Development Environments such as LabVIEW or Measurement Studio, or with one of NI's hardware product drivers such as NI-488.2 or NI-DAQ.
The IVI configuration utility allows you to interchange instruments without recompiling or relinking your application source code by configuring logical names. The user defines which specific instrument he wants to associate with a logical name and IVI takes care of the rest. If at a later time, the user decides to swap the instrument and use a diff
erent one, all he has to do is change the entry in the configuration utility so the logical name points to a different specific instrument driver (driver session).
So, the important point is that you have to have both, IVI class and specific driver installed on your system, and then you need to configure them in MAX. MAX 3.0 now has a built-in help to guide you through the configuration process. In the case that you still do not have MAX 3.0, you can find an application note about the IVI configuration in MAX 2.x on NI's Developer Zone: http://zone.ni.com/devzone/devzone.nsf/webproducts/E2947DB2FF0DD9FE862569FD006EB939?opendocument.
As for the adding functions into the class driver, the answer is no, that is not possible. You can certainly use the specific driver functions in the application which is written using the class driver functions but then your application will not be completely interchangeable in the future. However, this way you will just isolate a small portion of y
our code that you will need to change later on when you decide to change the instrument.
I hope this makes sense.
Regards,
Vesna Jadric
Instrument Drivers/IVI
