Distributed System Manager IOV alias

[viScience]

Is it possible to see both the IOV alias name and the physical channel name for

a cRIO channel?  The Project explorer displays cRIO channels this way and

it would be nice if the DSM would do this also.  Otherwise if you are tracing down 

a bad transducer on a high channel count module you will need to enumerate the

channels in your head.

[viScience]

To make matters even worse,  it appears that the cRIO channels are displayed in alphabetical order,

thus there is no way to directly determine the actual physical channel within the DSM.  You would

need to have the Project Explorer Open to cross reference to.  In my case LabVIEW may not always

be installed on the target host machines so the project explorer would not be available.

[Jeremy_B]

Are you referring to channels in the Scan Interface or just shared variables?

[viScience]

Just the Scan Interface, this is were a technician might want to look to troubleshoot the hardware in a system.

[Jeremy_B]

I don't think there is, the DSM is just looking at shared variables.  The Scan Interface doesn't make any other information available as far as I know.  You can probably change the names of the shared variables however.

[viScience]

The DSM classifies Scan Engine data as type IOV so it is aware of the difference between these and ordinary NSV's.  My interest really was

to make a point that the IOV channel names should be included in the display just as it it in the project view.  Perhaps I should have just put

this in the LV suggestion box.

[Christian_L · Accepted solution]

One possibility is to look in the following file stored on the cRIO system and extract the information from there.

C:\ni-rt/config/variables.xml

This file contains simple XML enumerating all of the IOVs in the current configuration on the cRIO system.

The attached example project shows how you can read and parse the information directly on the cRIO system. Of course you could also copy (FTP) this file to the host and parse it there.

Note: Scan Engine Channel Info Plus.vi included in the example, downloads its own bitstream to the FPGA to determine which C series modules are located in the cRIO chassis. Therefore this VI aborts and replaces any current FPGA VI running on the cRIO chassis. Use this VI with caution as it may cause serious problem in your application due to this interuption of the FPGA.

This example uses the CRI Component Reference Library to retrieve information about the current cRIO hardware from the system.

Message Edited by Christian L on 10-17-2008 12:31 PM

[viScience]

Hey Christian - pretty cool example of how to parse the variable.xml file.  I do not think I will need to use the FPGA stuff.  Also found a couple of bugs

and am submitting a corrected version.  As usual, thank you for all your help.

P.S.  Any word yet on the programmable scaling factors for IOV's?  Also heard that the next version will have a block mode API,  is that in reference to the

block data transfers from the FPGA to RT that was mentioned in our conference call?  That would be very nice to have for my filtering.