How can I find multi network instruments ?

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Hi !
How can I find multi network instruments in my program ? Many network
instruments are linked by my LAN. My program want to find them
automatically. How can I do it in CVI7.0 ? Does the CVI7.0 provide some
TCP/IP functions send the broadcasting command ? If it can, I could use
these functions sending command in the LAN and instruments in the LAN
respond my command. Then my program could find them automatically.

Thanks for any suggestion!

[MJF]

The TCP functions included in CVI will not do this for you.

This is not a trivial thing to do. You are going to have to delve into the SDK functions to directly access the socket API.

There is no standard way to do host discovery on a LAN. You could send an ICMP echo packet (ping) to each host address on the network but there is no guarantee that you will get a response from all hosts because some may have this function disabled or not supported. Once you have the addresses of each host, discovering what they are can be difficult. Not all hosts accurately report what they are.

If you have a specific protocol that you know the instruments will definitely respond to, you could use that to query the network. You could potentially either do a broadcast or sequentially query each of the possible IP addresses for the network.

I wish I could be of more help but this is not a simple task and I don't know the way your individual instruments work.

Good luck in figuring this out, it is going to be a big job.