Incorporating V COM driver(Agilent E8257D) in labVIEW

[gbs]

Hello

I was trying to find the driver for Signal generator Agilent E8257D, couldn't manage to get one in NI website, so i tried in Agilent which resulted me in geting the V COM driver. i installed this driver file, but when i moved to the functions palette in the lab VIEW to look for the instrument i/o to find the installed instrument driver in the pallete it cannot be viewed. I cross checked in the instr.lb folder where in i cannot find the installed file of the Agilent E8257D.What should i do to install this driver in this folder? Usually the instrument drivers are getting installed in c:\program files\national instruments\labview6.1\instr.lb for other instruments i can see some VI files installed in this folder. For this V COM driver how do i install and see the VI files?? to use it in the lab view. Please help..

[Dennis_Knutson]

What you download was an IVI-Com driver, not V-Com. There are several types of driver. One type is the LabVIEW native driver. These drivers use all LabVIEW functions. These are what you would typically download from NI and find on your palette. Several years ago, a new type of driver was created to make it possible to easily switch instruments from different vendors without having to re-write your program. This type was called IVI which stands for Interchangeable Virtual Instrument. The first IVI drivers were all written with LabWindows/CVI. There exists a tool to convert a CVI IVI driver to a LabVIEW driver and these will appear on your palette just like a native LabVIEW driver. One downside of these IVI drivers is that unless you have LabWindows/CVI, you cannot edit the driver. This type of driver is now called an IVI-C type driver because LabWindows/CVI is an ANSI C compiler. A few years after the IVI-C drivers were introduced, a few companies decided that creating a driver based on ActiveX was a better way to go. This type of driver became the IVI-COM type. IVI-COM drivers work a bit better for environments such as Visual Basic and C++. The problem is that there is no conversion tool to take an IVI-COM driver and convert it to a LabVIEW driver. That doesn'[t mean though, that you can't use IVI-COM. When it gets installed, the IVI-COM driver gets registered with the OS just like any other ActiveX object. You can create an automation reference to the driver's library and using the functions on the ActiveX palette, control the driver with it's properties and methods.