Instrument Control (GPIB, Serial, VISA, IVI)

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Serial port support doesn't seem to be correctly installed by installer created in app. builder

Hi,
I've built an exe and an installer for a Labview7.1 app and in the application builder I have ticked the option for including  serial port support. In the app. I've used the VISA I/O controls which are automatically populated with the available ports to select the port.  When I install the exe on a "clean" machine, ie, one with no NI software installed, these VISA I/O controls list the COM ports as ASRL1::INSTR,etc and they don't work.

These are the steps I've taken to rectify the situation:

1) I found that the version of VISA on my development machine was old, so I upgraded to v3.3. I then rebuilt the app and reinstalled it on the clean machine. No change. (I did however notice that the Visa32.dll on the development machine was v3.3.0.49162 and the one on the other machine was  v3.1.0.24.)

2) I Installed MAX on the clean machine. "Devices and Interfaces" was not present in the configuration pane, so I could see or do nothing.

3) I Installed VISA from the Device Drivers for Data Acqisition CDs. No Change.

4) I ran MAX again to check the aliases. All OK. Problem is fixed! Ports now appear as COM ports. But if I connect a USB COM port it shows up as ASRL4::INSTR until I run MAX again.

Obviously this solution is not practical for an .exe application. What really confuses me is that I have created numerous exe applications before which use serial coms and I've never had this problem.

Thanks,

Mike

 

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Version 3.3 is still not the latest. The latest is 3.6 so you can try downloading that but I think you'll still have to run MAX in order to make a new com device appear as 'Com1'. You see, Com1, Com2, etc. are just aliases for the actual VISA Resource Names of ASRL1::INSTR, ASRL2::INSTR. If your application allows the user to select a com port and ASRL1 is selected, that is exactly the same thing as selecting 'Com1" on your development system and they will work exactly the same. Your original version of the VISA run-time did not do the alias creation and that's why you didn't see the names. You are running the full version of VISA and MAX on your development system and that does do automatic alias creation. I believe the behavior of alias creation was changed with aVISA version more recent than 3.3 so getting the latest may solve your problem.
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