tds540

[Timothy 123]

We have a keithley 2000 and a tektronix tds540 in our lab. I have downloaded labview 8.0 drivers for both of these instruments, but when I open them, certain subvis open with a question mark icon. I cannot use these subvis when writing my program. How can I fix these problem.

[Dennis_Knutson]

Where do you see the question marks? On the palette or somewhere else? There are two folders that have to be put into the instr.lib folder. One is tkds5xx and the other is _shared. You should also restart LabVIEW after puting them there. I've only got 8.2 evaluation but everything shows up there.

[Timothy 123]

The question marks appear when I go to the block diagram of my vi and open up the tktds5xx driver. It opens up another palette. The question marks appear in the configure vis subpalette. Where did you download the driver. From the ni website or the tektronix site. I dowloaded the version for labview 8 from the ni website. There is also two files in this driver. One is called _shared and one is called tktds5xx. Both contain the library tktds5xx.llb. By the way, do you know what is the difference between a project style instrument driver and just a regular instrument driver.

[Dennis_Knutson]

I downloaded it from the NI site and the two llbs are named differently. The one in _shared is tktdsxxx.llb. It is used by a lot of different drivers for various tek scopes. Some of the configure functions are in this library and if you didn't move the _shared folder to the instr.lib folder that would explain the problem. Both the _shared and tktds5xx folders should be directly under the instr.lib folder. For info on project style drivers, you might want to check out http://www.ni.com/swf/presentation/us/labview/projinstdrv/default.htm . I don't know much more than what I've seen here. I'm still stuck with 7.1 except for having an eval copy of 8.2.

[Timothy 123]

Thank you,

Putting both files under the instr.lib directly solved the problem. This also worked for the keithley 2000 as well.

[Dennis_Knutson]

Good. The placement of the _shared folder is mentioned in the Installation Instructions that is on the download page but this is often missed. I always hated the idea of the _shared folder and I don't think that is allowed anymore with new drivers.

[Krista H]

If you place your curser over the VI with the ?, while context help is on, the context help should tell you what VI is missing. I suspect that you are missing NI-VISA which you can download from ni.com. Please try this and let me know.