Getting Started With Newport ESP300

[csimpson]

Hello, I am an undergrad working with a graduate student. I was told to purchase Labview and was given the Newport ESP300 motion controller. I have zero experience with either of these things. I can't get my computer to recognize the controller, let alone Labview to recognize it. I have LabView successfully installed. Can someone give me a step by step explaination of how to install the controller, get it to communitcate with labview, and which VI controls are appropriate to use in the context of motion control? ANY help is appreciated. Thank you!!!!

[Mark_Ramsdale]

The NI developer zone has a great instrumentation help.  I  recommend reading this link first and taking another stab at the question, so to speak.

instrument control

 Specifically the "getting started with instrumentation control" link on that page, great place to start 🙂

[Matt_W1]

For the LabVIEW help you're in right place as for the controller I think you can access it through RS232(standard serial port) or GPIB. Ours is setup through serial.

The rest of this is only relevant if you're using RS232

The majority of USB to serial converters don't work well at all. So I would suggest using a serial port directly on the computer if at all possible. I'm sure someone on here knows of a good usb to rs232 converter but I do not have a recommendation. After the controller is all plugged in (axes,power and serial) and turned on, then you can communicate with it through the VISA functions. I attached the ESP300 interface I wrote for our project and the ESP300 manual I used for reference. The code was made for a quick project so it isn't documented, didn't go through a code clean up, might have bugs and only has support for a very limited subset of the ESP300 functions. But the code is relatively simple and has support vis for adding additional ESP300 commands pretty easily. So it should be really helpful once you can work out what it is doing. The example.vi should connect to the ESP300 turn the motor on, home it then give you position control and feed back until you stop it. Hopefully that's enough of an example to figure out what the code does. If you need to add commands you can probably copy a current vi rename some controls and tweak the command characters used.

[nyc_(is_out_of_here)]

If at all possible, use GPIB and not RS232.

[Albert.Geven]

a driver for the newport motion controllers is available, not perfect but a very good start in readable labview with errorhandling.

Search on the web especially on the newport site.

[AWJ]

thanks for posting your VI- I found it very helpful in getting my ESP300 working!

[anilim9999]

Hello, I need to move a linear stage left and right  with Newport ESP300.I am in same condition as you were.Can you help me please !

[billko]

Since you posted in this topic, did you try anything in the previous messages?