How to include the usb lan driver with an installer

[altenbach]

I was trying to built a very lightweight installer for a tiny W10 PC that has very little disk space (32GB total). The project involves the sbRIO eval kit (sbrio-9637 based) and the labVIEW code uploads a stored sbRIO image (if needed) then interacts with it.

The installation builder correctly selects the "LabVIEW run time" engine and the "system cofiguration run time" automatically. Unfortunately, it fails to include the installer for the NI USB LAN ethernet driver. so when I plug in the USB cable, windows cannot find a driver for it and thus cannot communicate with the sbRIO. There is no ethernet port on that PC and I don't have a generic usb/ethernet dongle, just the special usb cable that came with the eval kit.. Good luck trying to find this driver on the NI website, I could not find it (but we all know that the search tools are not very good!).

I found the driver on the DVD deeply buried inside a folder called NI-USB-LAN (32 and 64bit versions) and if I manually run this installer (MSI), things work afterwards (i.e. windows correctly recognized the adapter when I plug in the special USB cable). I am sure that this driver is probably included in e.g. NI-RIO or some other huge package, but including that would add significantly to the size of the distribution. Why is this driver not listed as a selectable entry under "additional installers"? Maybe I missed something?

What is the correct way to add that to the installer so the target is immediately fully functional after installing the package. (The driver is only a few kb!).

Alternatively, maybe NI could submit this driver to microsoft so a driver update would be able to find it online automatically?

[KathrynTheGreat]

Hi Altenbach,

I’ve spent a bit of time today looking into your question, and I haven’t found a more elegant solution than the one you’ve found.

Generally speaking, all of the drivers you need for the sbRIO are going to be included in the CompactRIO driver package, but you’re right about the size- the latest version of that package ends up around 3GB. Although this isn’t the case for the most recent version, it looks like the 15.0 version of the USBLAN driver was published separately from the CompactRIO package- here’s a link: http://www.ni.com/download/ni-rio-15.0/5675/en/. The smallest driver package that includes the 15.5 version of the one you’re looking for is going to be the DAQmx package, at 1.7 GB.

Could you include the specific driver’s files in your project, and then have your LabVIEW code run their installer during its initialization?

[altenbach]

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@KathrynTheGreat wrote:

it looks like the 15.0 version of the USBLAN driver was published separately from the CompactRIO package- here’s a link: http://www.ni.com/download/ni-rio-15.0/5675/en/.

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Thanks for the link. The USB LAN driver folder contains both the 32 and 64bit versions and seems to work fine when I install it manually. That folder is less than 1.5MB but that driver download is almost 30MB. I guess it comes with a fancy installer. 😄

Especially in Windows 10, I am used to never have a need to find any drivers, windows finds 99.9% of them automatically.

What would it take for windows to find this NI USB LAN driver automatically from a web resource, solving all problems at once? 😄

[NikitaProrekhin]

Hello,

As I understood the link above http://www.ni.com/download/ni-rio-15.0/5675/en/ is a patch and not a complete driver.

We have a product built around cRIO technologies and we would like to include the driver in our installation package.

Is there another way to get the latest version of the NI USB LAN driver for distribution?

Has anyone tried extracting the driver from the complete cRIO installer?