LabVIEW
USB to LabVIEW: Si7005USB-DONGLE
Hi Syed,
your best bet is to ask SiliconLabs for either a detailed manual (including all programming information) or the source code of that demo software…
Hi Syed,
either use the supplied API - or try to use some sniffer software to learn about the communication between that example software and the dongle...
Gerd, there is no API. The driver ZIP is simply the Windows driver installer. It contains some DLLs, but no documentation about the DLL API or even just a header file (which is generally not enough for a safe driver interface library). And the Software.zip is simply the LabVIEW compiled exe which is of little use too to reverse engineer the API driver.
To the OP, such evaluation kits are almost never meant to be used as a real product. The idea of an evalution kit is to provide a platform on which a developer can do some experiments before and while he designs the chip into his own product. And that means indeed that you are supposed to design your own PCB with your own interface, be it USB, Ethernet, RS-232, PCI, Firewire or whatever you find useful and develop a firmware for the controller on that interface and according device drivers for every OS you want to support. Sometimes the evaluation kit comes with sample source code but by far not always and in this case Silicon Labs seems to not be interested to support their product in such a way. Either you find someone else at Silicon Labs who is more helpful or you have to rethink your idea about using this USB dongle for your purpose.
Since the actual sensor chip is I2C based, an alternative might be to use an Arduino or Raspberry Pi as controller. Searching on the net shows that their are Arduino libraries to talk to this chip. There is also a Linux driver for embedded boards that have an integrated I2C interface but that path is going to be quite a bit more complicated. Compiling your own Linux kernel for some embedded hardware controller is something that requires a lot of dedication and time.
Last but not least you could buy an USB-8441/8451 from NI which is an USB to I2C/SPI converter and that comes with extensive VI drivers to access the I2C bus directly from within LabVIEW. You still will need to implement the actual I2C communication in LabVIEW but this sensor is not very complicated so that shouldn't be a big hurdle.
