LabView and Blue Heat RS-485 cards

[BSeegmiller]

I am trying to get LabView to talk to a Blue Heat RS-485 serial card. Any comments from anyone.

[RossC]

Scrapheap,

Thanks for contacting National Instruments.

Assuming you are using LabVIEW 5 or later, you will want to use NI-VISA to send commands to the card. VISA is a software interface that lets LabVIEW communicate to serial ports, parallel ports, GPIB ports, and other interfaces to instruments. The RS-485 card's ports should show up as COM resources just like any other serial port. You will most likely need to install the driver for that card provided by the manufacturer to get the ports detected.

As far as the VISA programming goes, here is a link to a document which describes how to get started with VISA and serial:

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/conceptd.nsf/webmain/C553228FD78A7ADD862568F9006E9129?opendocument

I hope this helps you get started wit
h your application. Have a good day!

Sincerely,

Ross C
National Instruments
Applications Engineer

[BSeegmiller]

Thanks Ross (belatedly). It's working (as of your suggestion). it's true that the Blue Heat card comm ports weren't showing up, but now they are after receiving your suggestion. I believe it was by going into the W2K Device Manager, but the exact reason the comm ports showed up is less than clear, partly because I can't remember back that far.

Many thanks,

Bob