RE: OpenGToolkit-Developers digest

[Jim K. <ji...@ji...>]

Mike,

We'll have to see what NI's final word is.  I'm pretty concerned since some
folks I know are using VISA Serial in an embedded application that is a
shipping product. BTW, what sort of non-NI hardware can NI-VISA be used
with?  Serial port, USB port, Ethernet, VXI any others?  Can a non-NI GPIB
boards be used with NI-VISA?

-Jim

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ope...@li... 
> [mailto:ope...@li...] 
> On Behalf Of Michael Ashe
> Sent: Friday, November 07, 2003 9:20 PM
> To: ope...@li...; 
> ope...@li...
> Subject: Re: OpenGToolkit-Developers digest
> 
> 
> 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
> 
> 
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