Replacing NI-Serial with NI-Serial RT

[Joseph_Loo]

Under Labview 8, you can add additional installers. In the previous version, I used NI-Serial with the application. I want the installer to add the ni-serial package. Under the additional installer there is no entry for NI Serial but there is NI Serial for Labview RealTime 2.5.6. Will this module work in place of NI-Serial or do I have to install NI Serial module in by hand and do the installation?

[MissyS]

What version of NI-Serial do you have installed? I have version 3.0, and NI-Serial 3.0 "for Windows" and "for Windows and LabVIEW Real Time" appears as options under additional installers. What operating system are you going to run your installer? Windows?

Regards,

[Joseph_Loo]

I have the vanilla install of Labview Development with the Labview 8.0.1 installed in the system. NI-Serial does not show up as a separate installation package. NI-Serial RT does show up in my additional installer. As far as I can tell, the Driver disk has NI-Serial 1.8 available. 3.0 seems only available on as a download but not in a form that is consistent with the driver disk (different extension). In addition, MAX is 4.0.2 on the NI-Serial 3.0 versus 4.0 on the Labview development.

So how would you install NI Serial to make it an option of the additional installer? How do you update the driver disk, provided you have a copy on the hard drive? Is there a special way to make a copy of the driver disk on hard drive since i have two driver disk?

[MissyS]

You should have clicked on the setup.exe file, chose in the LabVIEW installation to install the Driver CD, or let the CD auto-run take you into the installer for the Driver CD's. That will let you choose which drivers to install. If you installed NI-Serial this way, you should have NI-Serial 1.8 as an additional installer. You may have installed NI-Serial after LabVIEW, which might have caused this issue.

If you do not have a Driver CD that contains the latest NI-Serial driver, you can download the NI-Serial 3.0 .exe file from the following link and run it. This will go through the setup. After updating the driver and restarting your computer, you should have NI-Serial 3.0 for Windows as an option for your installer.

http://digital.ni.com/softlib.nsf/websearch/A1F4E0BFDB3ADD228625711B005BAF63?opendocument&node=13206...

I found that the NI-Serial Real Time will not be the installer you are looking for to install support for NI-Serial devices on a Windows computer. You would also have to install NI-Serial for Windows to have access to NI-Serial devices there.

Regards,

[Joseph_Loo]

Are you saying that after you install Labview 8, you are suppose to install the device drivers using the device driver CDs?

[MissyS]

You can, but you do not have to. It is an easy method of installing many drivers that you may need at once. You can choose not to install specific drivers from the device driver CD's if you do not have the hardware they pertain to or want to keep an older version of the driver. Otherwise, you can download the drivers separately from ni.com and install the driver that way. Windows will not recognize your hardware correctly until you have the driver for that hardware installed. You should install the drivers after installing LabVIEW so that the installer will automatically install support (the VIs) for the driver into LabVIEW.

Regards,

[Joseph_Loo]

It will not let me do it. All the drivers were installed during the installation of Labview. In fact, after the installation, they still pointed to the cdrom drive. The only device it did not point to is the Labview 8.0.1 run-time option. All the other items point to e:\. I have to admit, after the installation NI-Serial 8.0 it changed the pointer to the correct locattion.

Could it be that during the installation, when I started to select the devices I want, the installation procedure was not working to change the locations?

[MissyS]

I don't understand what it won't let you do. Can you clarify that?

As default, the drivers will install from the device driver CD's during the installation of LabVIEW.

When you add additional installers to your application installer, it could ask you to insert the CD where you installed the specific driver in the first place. If you installed the drivers from a CD, you will see this message. The files necessary to create an additional installer are not cached on your computer after the installation is complete if you install from a CD. You will have to put the CD when you first create the installer in Application Builder. You should not have to have the CD when you then take that installer (that you created) to another computer.

However, if you copied the original driver installation files to your computer or installed the driver from files downloaded from ni.com, you may not see this pop-up. If the installation files are still in the same location that you installed the driver from, Application Builder will be able to find the source files (because they are still where they were).

Regards,

[Joseph_Loo]

The whole point was to get the NI-Serial package for the additional installer. When I first installed the Labview 8 package, there was no NI-Serial package that seemed to be updated. When I searched for the drivers, there was NI-Serial 1.8 and the NI-Serial Real-time version of the package. In one of the descriptions, it mentioned that it could replace the NI-Serial version. Since it seemed to be more current I was interested in using this package instead of the older version.

At a later period, I have discovered that I needed to install the NI-Serial 3.0 on the machine for it to work properly even though I do not use it on the machine. The devices I use is the ethernet version and there is only a specific application that use it. If I do not install the NI-Serial drivers on the development machine, it will not appear on the additional Installer list. This seems a bit convoluted considering you want to install all the packages you need for the target machine with the additional installer list.

The next point I wanted to have the system setup to install the additional installer without the CD. The CDs are in an area that is protected thus, whenever I have to get the CD, I need to go and get them. This takes awhile to get them. In addition, The builds take quite a few minutes to complete. I want to start the build and not have any manual intervention during the build. One of the purpose is to have the items point to the location where I keep all the files. It seems that the additional Installer still requires manual intervention regardless. It keeps prompting for the CDs and I just browse to the location (I already have the installers pointing to the location) and it completes the installation. There are no messages to tell me what is needed and what is not needed.

[Lorenz03Tx]

Joseph Loo,

I'm going to venture a guess or two here, so I apologize in advance if I have guessed wrong.

Is the device that you refer to that is requiring NI-Serial a Modbus device? You mentioned you didn't even need the serial (just the TCP/IP)? if that is the case you will be just fine if you don't install NI-Serial. You can use the Modbus I/O Server with the project and as long as it is configured for TCP/IP it will work just fine (it will not work over serial, and it will raise an alarm if you configure it to do so).

If this doesn’t apply to you then please disregard.
-Lorenz