GPIB-usb-hs using other driver

[chauhann]

Hi ALL
All help appreciated.
The company purchased a GPIB-USB-HS,but I was already using a PCI-GPIB to test the software that I have written.Problem is that I was using another driver to communicate with the PCI-GPIB.
I integrated the dll into the program and it's too far ahead to start over,my question is
1-can I use the other driver in my program and still use the GPIB-USB-HS.
2-And because the NI-488.2 driver has different function calls that I don't quite understand.They do the same thing send and receive data from an instrument.
3-What is the way to receive data using the NI488.2 driver.
Thanx!

[Dennis_Knutson]

I'm assuming that the pci card is not from NI. No, you can't use one vendor's low level driver with another vendor's hardware. Each vendor will implement the 488 controller differently. They will have different parts and different firmware. It's like two different video cards. Cards with ATI and NVIDIA chipsets will display an image on your monitor but they require two completely different drivers. One way to avoid your problem would have been to use the VISA API for communication (assuming your pci card vendor supported it). VISA sits above the lower level 488 driver and provides for portability. Again, using the video card analogy, software develops can use the DirectX API for graphics operations instead of hardware specific code. VISA does the same thing for 488. If you have to use the NI controller, you're going to have to rewrite your code.

[Geneva L.]

Dennis is right.  On the other hand, we could also assume that you are using NI's PCI-GPIB, but you are using a different driver version, such as v1.7.  The GPIB-USB-HS is only supported by v2.3, so there would be the conflict in the DLLs.  The option here would be to strip out the dependency of the DLL in your program, so that it is purely the driver's API calls, just the user-level application.  Then, you could install the v2.3 driver to use with the GPIB-USB-HS.