I do believe you're right, Nathan, and thanks for the reply. I just got word back from the manufacturer on this, and although I have a limited understanding of the subject, they do seem to corraborate the need for a DLL of some kind. For the good of the board, and for any further advice, I'll paste my answer fom them here:
Hi D****,
The uniqueness of MS3 is that its a custom device (as opposed to devices such as USB memory storage...etc.) which means you need a kernel level driver, so that the host OS loads it as soon as it is detected. Therefore, you need to have installed the MS3 USB device driver. This driver is installed when Bartsoft is installed, or we can provide it separately, if a user does not want to install Bartsoft. Here I am assuming you are choosing to make USB connection with MS3 (not RS232).
After having the driver installed on the host PC, you have two options to communicate with MS3.
1) Use a Windows DLL that we can supply. This DLL loads the low-level USB driver DLL and exports C style function calls that greatly simplify the communication protocol. This will require calling C functions and passing parameters that (in case of Asynchronous calls), include either call-back function pointers or a Windows Handle that will receive Windows messages (notifications) with pointer to a C style structure that contains measurements data. This approach hides complexity of MS3's communication protocol and its strict timing requirements.
2) Communicate with MS3 directly, using USB driver calls. In this case, you will still need to make DLL calls to the MS3's USB driver but this will be the USB DLL (not an intermediate DLL, as it happens in the first approach). The advantage here is that you don't rely on an intermediate DLL code and its possible bugs.
My colleague J*** D****, has had some experience connecting to MS3, using Labview on XP but when I asked him to help, he said he has not been able to do this since he had Windows 7. He did this by using VISA's driver wizard that created a driver. He is having a second look at this and I will forward you any results as soon as available.
Please let me know which way you would like to precede and I will be happy to send you the .DLL and .LIB files if you wish. I have VC++ application that shows how to load this DLL and use it but I am afraid have no Labview VI at the moment.
Thank you,
M*****
Based on this information, would it be possible for you to provide a short synopsis of the steps I'll need to take and the functions I'll need to use in labview to get this working? Your help is greatly appreciated!
