Upgrading an 8145 to LV 8

[Dave_Thomson]

    I had a bit of trouble upgrading my PXI-8145 to work with LV 8, and since I wasn't able to find some of the required information by searching the KB, I thought I'd make a post here that might help others.
   My PXI-8145 is rather old and came with a 32MB flash card and 32MB of RAM.  When I tried to load LV 8 and DAQmx 8 on it, MAX crashed.  Looking at the Compact Flash on a PC card reader, it became apparent that the card was full.  (Too bad MAX couldn't tell me that!)  So I went out and bought a new 256MB card.  After numerous tries, I couldn't get that card to work.  Once I had downloaded software onto it through MAX, MAX would no longer connect to the 8145.  Finally, I found a KB article that explained that not all brands of CF work on 8145's:  http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/CEC3567D82E4B87B86256BCE005CC8A4   NI sells cards gaurenteed to work, but at quite a premium.  So I went out and bought a different brand CF, and all the software loaded successfully.  MAX would now connect to the 8145 and report that it had LV 8 and all the new drivers that I wanted installed and ready.
   At that point, I plugged a DAQ card into the PXI chassis.  After rebooting, MAX wouldn't connect again!  I did a serial port redirect and observed the RT boot, to discover that it reported an Out-of-Memory error at the end of the boot.  If I then tried to connect MAX, it reported more of these errors.  It would appear that when the DAQ card is put in, the OS calls the related drivers and just then runs out of memory!  NI Tech support was able to verify that LV8 RT requires at least 64MB of RAM.
   I have ordered  128MB of RAM which should be here shortly.  I think things will probably be in good shape once that is installed.

Cheers,
   Dave Thomson

[JamesC]

Hi Dave,

Another option you can try is to NOT install the "Network Variable Engine" if you are not going to host any shared variables on the RT target.
It is the Variable Engine that takes up alot of the memory, which causes the need to upgrade the hardware.

Regards
JamesC
NIUK and Ireland

[Dave_Thomson]

JamesC,
   Thanks for the reply.
   For the record (in case anyone else ends up trying this), I only had LV8, DAQmx, and one other small driver (sorry, I can't remember which component it was) installed, and still had the memory error.  I did not have any parts of VISA or the Network Variable Engine installed.

Dave