How to Idenitfy a Non NI instrument ID in a PXI chasis

[jayamurugan]

is there any specific command to search the PXI slot for non NI instrument card to get the ID of that.
I don't know abou the NI visa ....will it help me to get the details of the non NI instrument on the PXI chasis.

[Trey_Hamilton]

jayamurugan:

You can use viFindRsrc to identify the VISA resources in your system. Any non-NI PXI device should show up as a VISA resource. You can then use VISA attributes to get the deviceID of that device.

Trey Hamilton
Applications Engineer
National Instruments
http://www.ni.com/support

[Dan_Mondrik]

In a separate posting, I once commented:

"If you are using third party modules, it depends on how they present their functionality. We recommend that vendors write instrument drivers and use VISA to do the I/O for both VXI and PXI. An example of a company that has done this is Ascor - you can use their switch modules with their instrument drivers and VISA makes that work seamlessly."

The reason for this is that there can be only 1 kernel level driver that can communicate with a given device. If the 3rd party vendor wrote their driver using NI-VISA, then NI-VISA will find it with viFindRsrc, as Trey mentioned. Otherwise, if the 3rd party vendor wrote a Windows-specific kernel driver, then there is no way that NI-VISA can find out any information about, or access,
that device. An example of this is a CompactPCI plug-in SCSI or Ethernet card, which comes with a standard off-the-shelf driver shipped with the Windows OS. NI-VISA does not report such devices.

Dan Mondrik
Senior Software Engineer, NI-VISA
National Instruments