beginner's question

[mideast]

i started to work with labview newly, the task im tryin to do is the following : i have a microcontroller and i wanna know if it is alive or not .. simply am tryin to open a port (com) and to ping the microcontroller using the functions (.dll provided).

as it could be seen from the attached file i have tow functions, the first opens a port (to the microcontroller) and returns a handle to the second function which pings the module (microcontroller). i tried to see if the functions return something but it looks like they don't.

am really stuck, i tried to read some manules but i didnt get what i want out of them!!

in all cases thx in advance .

[Dennis_Knutson]

Not sure how much help you can get. You have a piece of hardware that no one else has and you have a dll for it and you have neither provided the dll or any doumentation on it. Even with documentation, no one else can call the dll without the hardware. Is this a dll you wrote?

[mideast]

i did not write but i know how the way it behaves and i could give a short description about the mentioned functions :

the first one wimod_open has the following protype : handle alxmod_open(char *comPort) ... the handle is to be considered as unsigned long. comPort for example COM1.

the second one is wimod_ping :           bool alxmod_ping(handle x). 

hope it gives u some overview of what i have.

[Mark_Yedinak]

As Dennis mentioned without additional details no one will be able to accurately answer your questions. However, based on what you have provided I am not sure you will need the .dll at all. Basic serial communication is very easy in LabVIEW. There are several examples that ship with LabVIEW that you can look at. You would use VISA to open a serial connection and to read or write data on that connection. The second function call you specified may be a bit more challenging to implement in LabVIEW without a full understanding of exactly what the function is doing. A basic ping sounds fairly straightforward though and would probably be easy to reverse engineer what that function is doing. A serial port monitor would show you what was being sent and received. From there you should be able to implement it directly in LabVIEW.