Additional NI Software Idea Exchange

Hi,

this is an old question, see here, but so far I have not heard about a practical solution. The quest is to find all instruments on a local LAN that are switched ON (and connected to the LAN, of course). Unfortunately, viFindRsrc does not work. Pinging all possible addresses seems not a viable solution due to the required time, either. So it's possible to detect all serial instruments, all instruments connected via GPIB, but until now there is no standalone solution (i.e.without involving NI-MAX) to detect instruments on a local LAN...

Newer instrumentation (such as mass spectrometers..., i.e. no LXI instruments, no NI hardware) usually comes with LAN capabilities (instead of serial or GPIB). While ten years ago I could use viFindRsrc to detect this instrument (then with serial), now I miss a possibility to detect this instrument which is connected to my local LAN.

I have modern hardware but need to configure it manually...this is odd.

There is some software available to detect instruments on a LAN, but I did not want to use an extra program but a simple function call within C (using CVI)...

Thanks,

Wolfgang

PS: I am not sure that the idea label System Configuration API is appropriate, but no better label is available...

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Currently, NI Motion does not allow users to set the proportional gain (or any gain) less than one probably due to the fixed point math on the motion control cards. Many systems, especially those using ultra-high resolution encoders as feedback, are unstable with gains greater than one. Also, any system approaching the need to use Kp close to one will be extremely sensitive to the tuning process and will likely be difficult to optimize. An extremely simple solution to this problem is to add the ability to use Input and Output scale factors to the PID loop. Specifically, scaling the error term input to the PID controller for the input scale factor and the commanded output to the D/A or PWM's for the output scale factors. Even the ability to scale by factors of two would solve most issues. If only one scale factor could be implemented the output scale factor would be more useful as the input scale factor will effectively decrease the feedback resolution on a fixed point system. Other modern controllers utilize this strategy.

A quick search of the forums finds several people with this problem.

http://forums.ni.com/t5/Motion-Control-and-Motor-Drives/tuning-servo-system/m-p/139507/highlight/tru...

http://forums.ni.com/t5/Motion-Control-and-Motor-Drives/Is-there-any-way-to-drcease-the-open-loop-ga...

http://forums.ni.com/t5/Motion-Control-and-Motor-Drives/MAX-Reducing-Encoder-Resolution/m-p/1030934/...

http://forums.ni.com/t5/Motion-Control-and-Motor-Drives/7344-PID-proportional-gain-1-but-actuator-st...

Thanks!