NI drivers for NIcards NOT AWAILABLE WITHOUT SOFTWARE UPGRADE.

[bricolux]

You want to install a NI card in your PC and looking for a driver? You can have it on the NI.com web, but

ONLY EMBEDDED IN A SOFTWARE PACKAGE UPDATE!!!!!

This is very ennoying since you need to download hundrends of Mb, and worst of all YOU MUST INSTALL THE SOFWARE UPDATE.

Will your application still be as stable after that ? maybe not!!!

It is time consuming!

Some soft as the IMAQ for IEEE1394 require new licences, so either you pay or you must uninstall the new update and reinstall your old software.

Thank you NI for complicating things and only thinking about making money!

[shoneill]

Firstly,

which driver are you looking for, and which update are you required to install to get it?

Many updates (DAQmx for example) are based on technologies only introduced with later versions of software (7.1 in this case) and it's just a fact of life that not all older versions of software are compatible with new drivers.  It wouldn't be any use telling ATI to supply Win 3.1 drivers for their newest graphics card, would it.

You need to let us know which driver and which upgrade you're referring to.....

Shane.

[bricolux]

Thank you for considering my remark.

I was only trying to make a frame grabber Card NI IMAQ PCI-1407 work on a PC where IMAQ for IEEE 1394 2.0 is already installed.

So to get the driver for this card, you must install the whole update of IMAQ Vision (about 500Mb to be downloaded), which uninstalls the old IMAQ for IEEE 1394 2.0 and updates to IMAQ for IEEE 1394 2.0.2. And that later one requires a new licence (no free upgrade from 2.0 to 2.0.2 !), so I needed to uninstall the IMAQ for IEEE 1394 2.0.2, find the CD with the IMAQ for IEEE 1394 2.0 and install it back.

The same applies to any DAQ card.

Isn't this a bit ennoying?

[Dennis_Knutson]

I don't use frame grabbers and vision but I don't see how this applies to DAQ boards. They only time you 'have' to upgrade is if you buy a new type of board. For example, if you buy an M series, you have to install DAQmx. Or, if you buy a new model, you have to get the version of DAQmx that supports that board. That is no different than any other piece of hardware (video, network, sound card, etc.) that you might have to install in your pc.

While it may be a pain to archive and store the CDs that come with each board, it's pretty important to do so unless you want to spend the time downloading the driver when a pc crashes. Personally, we keep an image of each CD (major revs usually) on our server so we have pretty instant access to old versions.