Re: OpenGToolkit-Developers digest

[Michael A. <mic...@im...>]

Hi Kevin, others,

I haven't chimed in yet on this VISA issue, but it bears on not only the OpenG Toolkit, but very heavily on OSTE as well. I would like to distribute OSTE in executable form as well as the source code, with drivers and code modules, but with NI's licensing it might be pretty tough. Open(G)VISA would help a lot.  OSTE's grandfather was a military functional test system that was very heavily based on VXI and GPIB. Without VISA or the older VXI and GPIB drivers we'd be hobbled. Worse, NI could take OSTE, add VISA and distribute for less than the $395.00 of an outside license.

Any thoughts?  Lastly, I think I am going to try to find and dust off my old LabVIEW 3.1 and 4.1 versions to look back through the old pre-VISA driver stuff.

Cheers,
Mike Ashe
OSTE Project Manager

---- Kevin Valentine <k.v...@ve...> wrote:
> On 2003.11.07 17:10 ope...@li... wrote:
> > Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2003 22:09:20 -0000
> > To: "ope...@li..." <ope...@li...>
> > Subject: VISA alternative
> > From: "Jim Kring" <ji...@ji...>
> > Cc: <rol...@ci...>, <chr...@ep...>
> > Reply-To: ope...@li...
> > 
> > If anyone has been reading the info-lv thread on NI VISA licensing, you can 
> > see that there is a huge demand for an open source solution for serial and 
> > parallel port I/O.  NI only allows you to distribute 10 copies of your built 
> > application that uses NI "Driver Software".  After that, they want $395 per 
> > copy!  Sounds like a good openg project to me.  How about OpenGSerp and 
> > OpenGPortIO?  I don't have the background to code up the OS interface or 
> > sharedlib, but I can help with all other aspects of the project.
> > 
> > -Jim
> >
> 
> Wow, that is such a cool idea! Why not call it OpenG-VISA? Covers it all: GPIB, RS232, ethernet, etc. Haven't seen the info-lv thread (I just subscibed). Did a search for open source visa and found one place:
> 
> http://www.pnpi.spb.ru/~bazhenov/atel/English/whatVISA.htm
> 
> They refer to Open-Visa which they claim to be an open source version of visa. There's nothing more on their site regarding this. Googled more on open-visa, still nothing.
> 
> Checked out sourceforge.net found these:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-gpib/
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/gpib-tcl/
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/gpib82357a/
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/freedaq/
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/libgpib/
> 
> Am I correct in thinking that we would need these hardware drivers? I'm guessing that anything that NI has produced, even though open source, has the licensing restrictions you noted above. If we cant' touch anything of NI's then that's fine. Looks like there's enough out there for us to get started :-)
> 
> How much work will comforming to the VISA spec involve? Went to the vxipnp.org and dl'ed the spec (vpp-4.3).  Suppose I can answer this myself as I read through it (285 pages). Perhaps you're right about breaking it up into two separate projects, for now.
> 
> -kevin