Serial Port Communication without VISA

[Ludmilla]

Is there any way to communicate to serial port without VISA?

The thing is that VISA is required to be installed on deployed machine. It is not appropriate for my customer.

Thank you for any help.

[Albert.Geven]

there is a lib, but why is it not appropriate for your customer?

It is for free and is working.

You can use the old serial library from before lv7

I tried to find it but did not succeed i 5 minutes

[jdubs]

Ludmilla,

You can use just the NI-Serial driver.  As long as you only want to do serial communication, this will work.  The advantage of VISA is that you can communicate with it using a number of different protocols, resulting in minimal code rewrite if your system changes.

Hope this helps,

Jen W

Applications Engineer

National Instruments

ni.com/support

[Ludmilla]

I would return to the old serial port methods. They are a bit hard to find though. Is someone able to find them (National Instruments/LabVIEW 6/vi.lib/utility/sersup.llb) ?

Good luck

[Ludmilla]

AFAIK, NI-Serial driver has to be installed somehow on deployed computer?

[smercurio_fc]

It's polite to indicate that you've already asked this question on the LabVIEW forum. It's very annoying to create multiple posts.

[Ludmilla]

I posted my question in two threads. Both of them are related to my issue. Replies in two threads suggest different approaches, so, probably, it's not bad practice...

Of course, I'm sorry, I didn't notify about asking in second thread.

Guys, please, I deadly need the solution.

[Dennis_Knutson]

Why would you install the old driver and not the one for VISA? Makes no sense when you said the customer did not want anything else installed. Post to one of the C forums to see what they use.

[Dennis_Knutson]

Here's a vb option but of course you would need to install the ActiveX control and obtain a license for it as well.

[Ludmilla · Accepted solution]

You can find Non-VISA Serial Driver placed at:

http://www.mhst.de/downloads.htm

Pros:

• you don't need to install VISA Runtime on a deployed machine. Place one dll (dll is included) into system folder - that's enough.
• there are several additional functions which VISA doesn't have
• works reliably

Cons:

• works for Serial port only
• uses WinAPI functions