Hi GerdW:
Continuing with the discussion:
- the user manuals are available at NI website (like the LV2014 help)
Sorry but I was not able to find any licensing/user manual benchmarking the features of the different Labview Development packages (Base/professional/...)
what kind of "protocols" do you expect to use?
We want to design a simple test system for several PCB types we manufacture. This test system should be able to generate digital triggers and acquire digital status, acquire analog inputs and send/receive traffic through SPI/I2C/Ethernet buses of those boards. We want to use Labview and a simple adapter board connected via RS232 or USB to the PC and to the boards under test with the interfaces mentioned.
By now we are evaluating two options:
1-To use USB to I2C//SPI/GPIO from Diolan (DLN-2 USB-I2C/SPI/GPIO ADAPTER : https://diolan.com/dln2). This adapter board comes with Labview drivers for the USB communication. An ARM does the protocol translation for SPI/I2C, the GPIO and sweeps through the 8 analog inputs of the PCB. The manufacturer provides also drivers for those interface, so it looks like the adapter board can be fully programmed using Labview environment.The question here is : does the Labview base development system come with a generic USB block for the PC side?
2-To use a mojov3 development board (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11953). No Labview driver for this one. An FPGA can be programmed in VHDL (I am an experienced FPGA designer myself) to access the differrent interfaces in the board. An 8 bit atmel processor is in slave mode, sweeps 8 analog inputs and the FPGA fetches them via an SPI bus. I would add a simple RS232 UART in VHDL to interface with the PC.
The question here is : does the Labview base development system come with a generic RS232 block for the PC side of the UART?
In this youtube video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9sgAyjb-Kk I see a guy designing a .vi that uses something called VISA driver to interface an Arduino board via RS232. It's been long since I dont use Labview (>10 years, university times) , but I guess the Arduino is running a C code with the rs232 driver call and that VISA block the guy is using is only for the PC side of the UART.
When you use hardware you need to have a hardware driver - and a LabVIEW API for that hardware.
- When it is hardware by NI you get an API (mostly DAQmx) and you can use that API with each LabVIEW version.
- When it's hardware by a 3rd party manufacturer you need to ask that manufacturer for driver software…
Thanks. I had that already in mind. When I mentioned protocols supported I was talking about the PC side of the interface. Of course that if you need an interface hardware and that contains programmable components you need a driver for them. But I would expect that you can create your own driver for that HW , and that the PC Labview application can interface your HW for standard protocols (RS232, USB 2.0, Ethernet,...) by using generic VIs for those protocols.
regards,
Jose
