NI-VXI(TM) Software for Windows 95/NT Version 2.0 NI-VISA(TM) Software for Windows 95/NT Version 1.2 Copyright (c) 1995-1997 National Instruments Corporation. All rights reserved. Thank you for purchasing a National Instruments VXI controller and the NI-VXI/VISA software. We appreciate communicating with the people who use our products. We are also very interested in hearing about the applications you develop using our products. To make it easy for you to communicate with us, our manuals have a "Customer Communication" appendix that contains comment and configuration forms for you to complete. Completing these forms before contacting National Instruments makes it easier for us to help you. The "Where do I Start?" section of the "Read Me First" document contains the step-by-step instructions for setting up your system. CONTENTS OF THIS FILE --------------------- LabWindows(TM)/CVI Run-Time Engine Uninstalling NI-VXI/VISA Software VISA Support for Multiple GPIB-VXI Controllers New Utilities: T&M Explorer and NI Spy Improvements And Bug Fixes in This Version NI-VISA NI-VXI for All Hardware NI-VXI for PCI-MXI-2 Only Known Bugs LABWINDOWS/CVI RUN-TIME ENGINE ------------------------------ The Setup program now automatically installs the LabWindows/CVI Run-Time Engine when necessary. Two NI-VXI and VISA interactive utilities, VIC and VISAIC, require the LabWindows/CVI Run-Time Engine 4.0.1 or later to be installed. When you install VIC or VISAIC, Setup also installs the LabWindows/CVI Run-Time Engine if it is not already present. UNINSTALLING NI-VXI/VISA SOFTWARE --------------------------------- After uninstalling NI-VXI/VISA, some DLLs and executables may be left in the NI-VXI and VISA directories. To complete the uninstall process, you must restart your machine. Note: the uninstaller application will not notify you when rebooting is necessary. If you're planning to re-install NI-VXI/VISA, you should always reboot the machine after running the uninstaller. VISA SUPPORT FOR MULTIPLE GPIB-VXI CONTROLLERS ---------------------------------------------- NI-VISA supports multiple GPIB-VXI controllers in a single system. Because the National Instruments GPIB-VXI controller ships with a primary address of 1, NI-VISA automatically searches for any GPIB-VXI controllers at that address. If you have changed the primary address (for example, if you added a second GPIB-VXI controller to your system, and set the address of the second controller to 9), or if you have a GPIB-VXI controller from another vendor, you need to add it using T&M Explorer so that NI-VISA can find it. Select the 'Add Device' menu option to add a new GPIB-VXI interface. Specify the controller's GPIB primary and secondary addresses, as well as the GPIB board to which it is connected. Then specify a new GPIB-VXI interface number and its logical address (usually 0). If you are using a GPIB-VXI command module from another vendor, you also need to obtain and install that vendor's VISA GPIB-VXI component. NEW UTILITIES: T&M EXPLORER AND NI SPY -------------------------------------- This release of NI-VXI 2.0 and NI-VISA 1.2 for Windows 95 and Windows NT contains two new utilities designed to help you configure and develop your test system quickly. Use T&M Explorer to view your entire test and measurement system and configure various components. When you launch T&M Explorer you see all your VXI, GPIB, PXI, and Serial devices together on the screen. T&M Explorer replaces VXIedit and VISAconf. You can also configure National Instruments VXI and PXI data acquisition instruments directly from T&M Explorer. NI Spy tracks the calls your application makes to National Instruments T&M drivers, including NI-VXI, NI-VISA, and NI-488.2. NI-488.2 users may notice that NI Spy is very similar to GPIB Spy. It highlights functions that return errors, so you can quickly spot which functions failed during your development. The old utilities are still available in this version of NI-VXI/VISA, if you neet to use them, select 'Custom Setup' when installing the software. If you have any questions about using the new utilities, refer to the "Common Questions" appendix in the Getting Started manual. IMPROVEMENTS AND BUG FIXES IN THIS VERSION ------------------------------------------ NI-VISA ------- Calling asynchronous operations in a loop could cause memory leaks. Calling asynchronous operations were far slower than their synchronous counterparts. Performance of asynchronous operations has improved significantly with this release. The type library embedded in visa32.dll had problems with viClose, viGetAttribute, and references to the VISA online help. These have been corrected and tested with Visual Basic 5.0. Also, the types ViRsrc and ViString were defined in the type library but were not actually supported by Visual Basic. These types have been removed, and you should use the intrinsic String type instead. VISAIC's help did not work correctly when running in LabVIEW mode. Right-clicking on an attribute or event to get help for that specific topic would result in a Windows Help error message. In certain cases, event handlers for VI_EVENT_SERVICE_REQ with GPIB devices would not be called for more than one event occurrence. This was usually seen when invoking viReadSTB from within the callback handler, which is a documented and supported feature that now works correctly. viPrintf would sometimes send an extra EOI in the middle of a string. This was usually seen when the length of the string being sent exceeded the formatted I/O buffer size. viRead with Tektronix CDS devices using the GPIB-VXI could time out early in the previous version. NI-VXI for All Hardware ----------------------- You no longer need to run VXIinit to initialize settings on your hardware. We now take care of loading hardware settings in the driver, completely removing the need for VXIinit. NIVXI32.BAS now includes the trigger functions for the TIC. FindDevLA is now declared properly in NIVXI32.BAS. Previously, if you called the InitVXIlibrary VI in your LabVIEW diagram and quit before calling the CloseVXIlibrary VI, you could crash your Windows NT system Setting Shared RAM Size to 'All System RAM' now correctly determines the amount of memory installed. VXIinLR and VXIoutLR now support byte accesses. NI-VXI had a memory leak when you called InitVXIlibrary and CloseVXIlibrary repeatedly. This has been corrected. If you change the default serial settings in the Port Settings configuration tab in T&M Explorer, the specified values are used only if your application passes the value VI_LOAD_CONFIG (4) to the viOpen operation. Otherwise, the the original default settings are used whenever you open a session, such as in VISAIC. This feature is for compatibility with existing applications and VXIplug&play drivers, which can safely assume the VISA-specified default settings without having to pass any special values to viOpen. NI-VXI for PCI-MXI-2 Only ------------------------- InitVXIlibrary now will fail if you don't have a MXI System Controller. VXImove now correctly moves data between two VXI addresses. KNOWN BUGS ---------- On Pentium Pro and Pentium II computers using the PCI-MXI-2, VXImove and viMoveXX transfers with large buffers may result in spurious bus errors. The workaround is to use programmed I/O transfers instead of DMA. This can be accomplished by setting AccessP_PIO(XFER_PIO) (bit 11) in the access parameters argument to VXImove. You also can force programmed I/O transfers by setting the DisableMiteDMA value to 1 in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\National Instruments\NI-VXI for WIN32. You can edit the value of that key with the Windows utility REGEDIT. In a GPIB-VXI system, VISA may fail to recognize the GPIB-VXI controller if there is any register-based device in the system, and if any device uses a logical address at or under 16 (other than the GPIB-VXI itself, which must be at LA 0). The workaround if to use register-based devices with the GPIB-VXI is to keep all device logical addresses above 16. If you have NI-488 installed on your system, both GPIB Spy and NI Spy use the .spy file extension. These file types are not compatible. In order to load a .spy capture file, you should run the specific application and then choose the File|Open menu option rather than double-clicking on the file from the Windows Explorer. On the VXIpc-860 controller, it is possible for large GPIB transfers to occasionally cause the operating system to crash. If the operating system crashes during a GPIB transfer or VISA find resources function - viFindRsrc()-, disable the DMA capabilities of the GPIB AT-TNT chip. You can do this by specifying an alternate configuration for the AT-TNT in the Windows device manager that does not use DMA.