PXI MXI-3 Initialisation problem on Win2k

[Mart Bull]

I'm using an 8 card PXI chassis, which is connected to a Win2k PC by a MXI-3 bridge. I have found that adding one particular card to the rack (a value motion card) causes system initialisation to fail - Windows boots OK, but even MAX can't see any cards. The problem occurs on the two target machines intended to run the rig, but not on my development machine. Any ideas how to diagnose/fix this?

[Julianna]

There are certain cards that do not work across PCI-to-PCI bridges (which MXI-3 is based on). Cards that use serialized IRQs, require I/O space below 4KB, etc. Certain motion cards, specifically the PXI-7314 and PXI-7324, do not work with MXI-3 because they require I/O space which is not implemented in Win2000. I believe these two motion cards were updated to remove this problem. I am not sure if this is the issue you are seeing, since everything does work on one machine.

What do you mean by "system initialization fails"? Are you referring to the MXI-3 Optimization software?What happens when only the MXI-3 and the motion card are in the chassis? Does the system work with other operating systems?

[Mart Bull]

Thanks for your comments. The PXI-7314 is the card in question - My first thought is that we could have been sent one of the pre-update cards. however, presumably this would cause the problem on all Win2000 machines, whereas we only see it on the target machines. The machines we see the problem on are 1 GHz Intel Pentium 3's which our client purchased from an extremely small low cost manufacturer in the UK - so I'm wondering if the problem may lie there.

What we see when the card is installed (including when only the MXI-3 and the 7314 are in the in the rack) is that the MXI-3 optimisation runs, detects the PXI rack OK, but fails to detect any cards. Trying to access the cards from Visual Basic via ComponentWorks custom controls obviously fails, and MAX d
oesn't report any cards.

[Julianna]

I spoke with the developers, and apparently it is possible for the issue I mentioned to appear on one Windows 2000 machine and not another. I am consulting with the Motion group to figure out how the issue was resolved for the PXI-7314. I will post another message when I find out the course of action.

Julianna Forrest
Applications Engineer
National Instruments
http://www.ni.com/support

[Julianna]

There are two versions of the PXI-7314, an IO Mapped and a Memory Mapped. This memory mapped version (part number 777711-04MM) will not cause the problem you are seeing with the card you currently have. If you have not purchased all of the hardware for the deployment systems, please use the above part number to order the correct version of the PXI-7314. If you have already purchased all of the hardware, I would recommend contacting your sales representative to discuss the options.

[Mart Bull]

Many thanks for your advice on this one!