Can PXI card be transparently substituted for PCI card in VME control?

[John Price]

Background:
We are purchasing a displacement-measuring-interferometer system from Zygo that ships with your NI VME-PCI8012 (777244-03) PCI to VME bridge. The Zygo system includes drivers for the bridge and a Windows application that runs on the host PC to acquire data from the measurement boards in the VME chassis. I wish to connect this system to my NI PXI-based data acquisition system (DAS).

Question 1:
I need to know if your NI VME-PXI8015, "PXI-8320, MXI-2 System Extender, Board Only Kit" (777573-01) can be installed in my PXI DAS and connected to the VME controller board, and function transparently to the Zygo Windows application that drives the VME system.

Question 2:
Our PXI-based DAS has
an embedded controller (NI PXI-8187) that is running Windows XP. Are the drivers that come with the PXI and PCI bridge cards compatible with Windows XP?

Thank you for your help and I look forward to your reply.

John Price

[LoganS]

Hi John,

Answer 1:
By definition, the MXI cards should function transparently. From ni.com and our internal documentation:

MXI-3 is a PCI-PCI bridge that is used to expand the PCI bus. MXI-3 is the successor to MXI-2 and MXI-1. Because this is a PCI-PCI bridge, it is completely transparent to the OS and to your program

While the above definition is regarding MXI-3, it fully applies to MXI-2.

Answer 2:
The PXI and PCI bridge cards' software include different versions of NI-VXI/NI-VISA. All the specs I saw online listed them coming with older versions of the drivers, ie for Windows 95, 98, and NT. If this is the case, then you'll want to download the latest version of the NI-VISA driver (3.3.1) from ni.com. The latest driver should ship with your card,
but if for some reason it doesn't, downloading it will take care of you.

Most Current VXI Drivers

Hopefully this is enough information to get you on your way! Good luck!

[John Price]

Thanks Logan!

Unfortunately, Zygo's software does not support the newer NI-VISA drivers. Here is their response to my second question:

Zygo Tech Support: "I agree you should be fine." (using PXI instead of PCI) "But remember, if you do use their latest NI-VXI/VISA drivers, our 'ZMI System Software' will not function. If you're writing your own or even calling the .dll, you should be ok."

Then I asked: "Out of curiosity, why doesn't the 'ZMI System Software' work with the latest versions of the NI drivers? Did they make significant changes between the old and new?"

Zygo Tech Support: "For one they moved files around on us. For example our program calls resman.exe (NI resource manager) when the software loads. After 2.1.1 they moved its locatio
n so the software can't find it. There are a few other basic problems like this, then I suspect there are some function implementation changes but I'm really just guessing."

Do you have any suggested work-arounds Logan?

[LoganS]

Hi John,

Thanks for your reply. Before I respond to your new question, I need to clear something up from my previous response. I misunderstood what you were asking, and posted some information that needs to be clarified.

MXI-3, while a successor to MXI-2, is quite different from MXI-2. MXI-3 is a PCI to PCI bridge , where MXI-2 is a VME to VME bridge. Also, MXI-2 requires the proper driver to function correctly.

For more information about the differences between MXI-3 and MXI-2 see the KnowledgeBase article, Upgrading VXI Systems from VXI-MXI-2 to VXI-8340 Series (MXI-3) 

For the current driver required for MXI-2 to function with your
operating system, refer to Current NI-VXI Driver Versions

However this does not change the fact that you CAN replace the PCI-MXI-2 controller that shipped with your Zygo system with a PXI-MXI-2 controller.

As far as working around Zygo's use of the 2.1.1 driver goes, you could try to get your PXI system to work with the 2.1.1 driver. By all that I can tell, the 2.1.1 driver was developed to support PCI-MXI-2 on several operating systems, including Windows 2000, NT, ME, 98, and 95, and so you would need to be operating under in one of the supported operating systems in order for the driver to even be a possible solution. So, assuming you are using a supported operating system, I would download that 2.1.1 driver and install it in your system, and go from there. You can get directly to PCI-MXI-2 driver for Windows by clicking here.


Hopefully this gets you going, but let me know what ends up happening. Good luck!

Logan S.

[LoganS]

Hi John,

There is another possible solution to your issues with Zygo's product and the most current driver. If the only conflict that you run into is the location of Resman.exe, you could download the 3.3.1 driver and copy Resman.exe into the c:\NIVXI folder so that Zygo's software could find it just fine.

Good luck once again!
Logan S.

[Otman]

John,

We (my department) recently bought the exact same system (ZMI 2000) as you, and I'm just curious to know if you got yours up and running. We also got their software, but decided to develop our own that will meet our needs. As you're probably aware, the chassis comes with several interfaces that you can use of which we decided on GPIB.

We intend to use this system as an angle generator to calibrate autocollimator with very tight tolerances as most of our applications are space-based.

Otman Estrada
Raytheon Company