RS232 problems in Test Executive mode (Operator Mode)

[justin1269]

Hi All,

I am currently using TestStand 2010, and I having the following problem it's driving me nuts: Whenever I open my sequence with the "TestStand Sequence Editor" and step through my code I am able to communicate via serial with my Device Under Test without any problem. As soon as I open the sequence with "Test Executive" then I have Serial communication problems. I am not sure whether the "TEST EXECUTIVE" Mode is faster than the Editor. Right now it's driving me crazy, any help would greatly appreciated.

Thanks

WJ

PS I am currently using the USB to Serial from B & B Electronics

[~jiggawax~]

Try and step through the code with the Test Executive.  Are you using the full-featured one or the simple one?

If you can step through it with Test Executive and it works then I'd say it is a race condition.  Is the Test Executive on the same machine as the Sequence Editor?

Regards,

[justin1269]

Hi.

I think I am using the "Full-Featured" User interface. What is the difference between Full-Feature and Simple?. I have an idea maybe my PC is faster the Unit Under Test in term of getting a response via the serial port. Maybe I could place a wait before the response command.

Thanks,

WJ

[~jiggawax~]

I'd try the wait.

The full featured UI is a lot bigger and has a tab control in the middle with different views on each tab.

The simple one doesn't have the big tab control in the middle.

Regards,

[rf_king]

Are you using a LabVIEW vi to handle the serial port read/writes?  From my experianece, a visa read call to a serial port has a 10 second timeout by default. Which means that it will wait 10 seconds for the read to complete. I've run into similar problems where the Teststand development would run perfectly fine but a user interface doesn't work at all. I've found that it's usually because the adapter settings in the UI is set to use that adapters run time engine. If you're using the full featured UI example, it'll have the File, Edit, etc menu bar at the top. Go to the configure menu tree and select "adapters". Check the configuration for the adapter that your serial read steps are using and make sure that it's using the development engine.

[justin1269 · Accepted solution]

Thank you for all your help! RF

After changing the the adapter and it seems to work

[justin1269]

RF_King

Thank you

[rf_king]

You're welcome! I was curious as to why this happens, and it turns out that basically the runtime engine doesn't know where all of the vi's are located at which are included in the vi.lib, user.lib, or instr.lib. This normally isn't a problem with labview because you would build an executable of your project and it would include them. Teststand runs the vi's outside of being an executable. If you duplicate the machine that you're developing this on, and don't want to install the whole development environment, you can use the Teststand deployment utility to create support folders that will include all of the vi's needed so you UI can run using the labview runtime engine. This whitepaper shows how to use the deployment utility.

http://www.ni.com/white-paper/9923/en/