Instrument Control (GPIB, Serial, VISA, IVI)

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Serial port data acquisition with OS X

I recently purchased LV 7.01 for OS X. I haven't used LabView since version 5.0x (both PC and Mac). I am now trying to set up some data collection via the serial port but am not having any luck figuring it out. (I have experience doing this with LV 5.0x and understand the basics.) In running any of the example vi's dealing with the serial port I seem to run into a VISA error -1073807202. It is not clear to me if VISA is part of the full dev system I bought or a separate product. I have hunted around this website quite a bit, but haven't found any good answers.
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NI-VISA does come with LabVIEW on all LabVIEW platforms, including Mac OS X. It should come with the base version and higher (ie, including FDS).

The error you get is BFFF009E, "A code library required by VISA could not be located or loaded." This indicates that a VISA isn't installed, or at least LabVIEW can't load it. There is an option in the LabVIEW installer as to whether to choose to install VISA, but it should be checked by default. You can verify that NI-VISA is installed by going to /Library/Frameworks and looking for VISA.framework

If it's not there, re-run your installer. If it is there, I'm not sure what the problem is. You might want to make sure both the following files exist:
/Library/Preferences/NIvisa/visaconf.ini
/Library
/Preferences/NIvisa/Passport/nivisa.ini

By the way, that second file won't exist if you have NI-VISA 3.0. You might also want to try to upgrade to NI-VISA 3.1 from www.ni.com/downloads - I know that we fixed a handful of problems, but nothing I can think of related to loading/initializing the library itself.

Dan Mondrik
National Instruments
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You were correct. VISA did not get installed on the first go round... Installed a second time and things seem to work. Thx.
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