I don't know why you've taken offense at what I've said. Today was the first time I'd even encountered this forum, and that was because someone had posted a question on the old newsgroup that looked like it might produce a lead to one of many questions I've had regarding how to get useful work out of this NI hardware and software that's been in house for several years.
I admit I should have provided a fall-back path to cover what I considered an unlikely event, one that did nonetheless occur, namely the untimely death of my business partner, who handled all the GPIB-automated T&M. The stuff we do isn't terribly taxing or esoteric. I had no idea how obscure the details are.
Of the several phone conversations with NI people here in the U.S. and other purportedly knowledgable individuals, I got numerous recommendations as to what to buy, but not one reference to this forum. I suspect that, given a few moments to regroup and consider precisely what questions to ask and in what order, there are people on this forum who could help me find the answers.
My complaints are about support and documentation of NI products. Since most of the hardware is multiple years, in somce cases, decades old, I don't expect much help from NI with that. However, the software for the fairly recent PCI GPIB card in house had about 15 lines of English doc and perhaps twice that in Japanese. I couldn't even find any doc's specifically for that card on NI's site because their docs are lumped together for several cards and none of the pictures matched the card I had in my hands. There were other doc's that referred to that card by picture, but weren't user guides or anything of the sort. That's why I started "lurking" the Labview newsgroup, hoping to encounter a message that related in some way to what I wanted to accomplish. With only a couple of dozen messages in the nine months since I started occasionally watching, I didn't find much.
I have two versions of LabVIEW, though I doubt they're really necessary. One is v5.1, probably to be associated with an old ISA-Bus AT-GPIB card that we've had for decades, and one is v7.-something, which I'm not sure was ever really usedm though it was purchased and installed some years back for use with XP and the PCI GPIB card, which I was never advised was being used.
I understand that there are ways of operating these instruments without LabVIEW. All I want to be able to do, since I can't find the source code, batch files, etc, that my late partner used, is to "talk" to our GPIB hardware from a DOS-based 'C' compiler, and record readingstaken by these instruments.
What I want to find is precise documentation on how the NI boards are to be used from some HLL in order to provide access to all the functions of the AWG, AFG, power supplies, DMM's, 'scopes, logic analyzers, counter/timers, function generators, etc. Isn't there a specific document that describes how one should proceed to do this?
Once I have the doc's that tell me how, I suspect I can figure it out.
Edick
