Has anyone attempted and/or had success w/ using an AltaDT 1553 card with NI Linux RT?

[blackburnite]

I have a PXI-1553 card from AltaDT which works fine with LabVIEW RT on a PXI running PharLap.  However, for other reasons, it is necessary to switch to NI Linux RT on that PXI.

Does anyone have any experience building the AltaDT Linux driver from their source and successfully using it in this configuration?  It appears to do so, the build system must be online in order to insall some support libraries provided by Alta.

[johntrich1971]

Were you able to get this working? I'm having some issues with this myself and would greatly value any experience that you have.

[brettstahlman]

I also am attempting to get this working. Everything builds and installs without error, but when I attempt to run a test program, I get the "Device not found" error, even after verifying the correct device id for the installed A429 card. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

[blackburnite]

We were able to slog through up to the point where we could initialize and uninitialize a 1553 card. Unfortunately I never ran into a device not found error. I know there are some steps in Alta's shipping test program prior to building where you have to configure it for the correct type of card. That's the only thing I can think of off the top of my head.

The main issue we were encountering came after the process of building and testing in a simple SSH prompt. When we attempted to call the built .SOs from the LabVIEW call library node, there were issues with how the L0 library was getting linked to the L1 library. We had to use a static L0 library to get that to work. You'll have to contact Alta for support on that. Unfortunately the dev I was directly working with has since retired so I don't have that contact for you.

We did eventually get it to the point where we could initialize and uninitialize our card entirely from LabVIEW RT but when we actually tried to use the full functionality on a system we were seeing missing packets, timing problems, etc.

Alta just didn't have sufficient support for NI Linux RT and eventually the effort to get it working didn't make sense anymore. We ended up switching to 1553 cards from AIM which are fully supported on that OS and have a much easier to work with LabVIEW API.

[brettstahlman]

Interesting. I'm already linking the L0 library statically, and I'm pretty sure I'm configuring the card correctly in the test program: i.e., I'm setting DEVID to reflect the correct backplane type, board type, board number, etc. Unfortunately, because both the L0 library and a significant chunk of the WinDriver library ship without source code, my ability to debug the failure is severely limited.

I really appreciate your letting me know the outcome of your experiment. It tends to confirm my hunch that, as much as I hate to write off a sunk cost, this is probably not the best approach for what we're trying to do.