berkely nucleonics 577

[NoClue2016]

So I am very new to LabVIEW and have been tasked with designing a pulse generator program for the Berkely Nucleonics 577 Pulse Generator. I have tried to find any help on this and it is either far far too complicated for me or it is not there. So i am lost and have no clue what to do. The design is to have a LED light pulse one color, wait, pulse a second color, wait, and then repeat. Any assistance would be much appreciated.

[mikeporter]

Have you gone through the LabVIEW tutorials? I know you want to get started on the final project, but sometimes you have to step back, take a deep breath and learn a bit first.

Have you talked to the instrument vendor? They should be able to give you guidance on how to communicate with their device.

Mike...

[NoClue2016]

Hello! And yes, I've gont e through the tutorials, and I understand the basic premise of LabVIEW, I know how to get fuctions and connect them, run the program. I just dont know how to assemble a system or what functions to use for a pulse generatror, let alone a pulse generator that needs two different leds to go off at seperate times. 
As for the manufacturer, I've read through that manual and online website, and there appears to be no chance for assistance for developing a pulsegenerator on labview.

Thanks for replying!

[mikeporter]

OK, what the vendor can do for you is provide drivers for the device.

If you were to just write out in words what would the program need to do? Step by step?

Mike...

[Dennis_Knutson]

They do have a LabVIEW driver for your instrument. Using a driver is explained at http://www.ni.com/downloads/instrument-drivers/

Before you can use a driver, you have to understand the instrument itself. Start by manually configuring it and then try to reproduce the set-up with a program. You can look at the programming manual for the needed functions/commands and compare them to the functions/commands on the block diagrams of the driver VIs.

[NoClue2016]

Hello, sorry for the delay, I was momentarilly taken off the project to assist elsewhere in a pressing matter, now I'm back

I have the berkely Nucleonics 577 Pulse generator running and operational. What I need to do it connect it to my computer, which I have done, and create simple a control panel for that generator that allows me to do the following.
 
I two LEDs inside the same housing with different colors (red and green) they have seperate wires for connecting to the pulse generator. I would like to have it so that only the green LED is turned on for 1 second, then it is turned off and there is a 1 second interval of no LED being used, then the Red LED being turned on for 2 seconds, then being turned off for 2 seconds, and then the entire cycle repeats. I need this connected via labview so that if I wanted to alter any of the time intervals I could do so easily.

Thanks a million for any and all help. 

[Dennis_Knutson]

And what sorry of problems do you have with the provided driver? What error messages do you get? What is the physical connection? Have you tried communicating to the instrument with the VISA test panel in MAX?

[Alexander_Sobolev]

There is a very simple solution, but you need a relay and a usb-com converter. 

BNC loads last configuration when turned on and can autostart, so you configure its 2 channels as needed, save settings. Then use com as a digital line to turn on relay and power BNC on.

[NoClue2016]

I've now found the VI's that came with the 577 device (thanks for the help alerting me to that) but when I try to run some of the more simple ones, I recieve errors. Additionally through the other uses of the computer I have found that When I connect the decive to my computer via USB it is read under COM4, unfortunatley it appears that LabView only has the options to allow me to switch between COM1 and COM2, neither of which is obviously the right one. ( I will try to post a picture of my error when I can access the computer, I am not at the computer at this moment)

[NoClue2016]

He is the Vi titled "initialize" I have the block diagram and front pannel shown, I get errors at ID query