RE: API Serial Functions

[dan . mondrik]

Scot, Allen, et al:

In your posting you said "NI-VISA requires an installation that is often
larger than the application we supply to our customers ... I was hoping to
develop our own serial functions in a much smaller package than NI-VISA."

I just wanted to let you know that starting with LabVIEW 7.0, NI-VISA for
Serial only is now included when you have LabVIEW PDS build the application
and installer distribution.  That's less than 400 KB of VISA files on the
target system and directly addresses your concern (and that of many other
customers) about the package size.

Dan Mondrik
National Instruments



                                                                                       
                                                
                      "C. Allen                                                        
                                                
                      Weekley"                 To:       "'Scott Hannahs'" <[EMAIL 
PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>          
                      <[EMAIL PROTECTED]        cc:                                    
                                                 
                      g>                       Subject:  RE: API Serial Functions      
                                                
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                      a.army.mil>                                                      
                                                
                                                                                       
                                                
                                                                                       
                                                
                      03-08-2004 09:31                                                 
                                                
                      PM                                                               
                                                
                      Please respond to                                                
                                                
                      aweekley                                                         
                                                
                                                                                       
                                                




Scott,

Thanks for the response.

Yes.  My company manufactures a variety of instruments that communicate
solely with serial.  We have been using NI-VISA and are happy with it,
but NI-VISA requires an installation that is often larger than the
application we supply to our customers, and there are licensing
restrictions for distribution. I was hoping to develop our own serial
functions in a much smaller package than NI-VISA.  This is why I am
interested in using the Windows API.  NI-VISA with its support for so
many kinds of instruments seems like overkill for our application.  When
the customer installs the NI-VISA driver they end up installing features
to support GPIB etc. that are not needed for our application.

Allen

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Hannahs [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, March 08, 2004 6:14 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: API Serial Functions


At 4:27 PM -0800 3/8/04, C. Allen Weekley wrote:
>Has anyone written VI's to perform serial I/O using functions in
>kernel32.dll?

Allen,
Why re-invent the wheel?  Actually the people who did this are the
people who wrote the VISA library. Any reason not to use their work?

-Scott