RE: VISA alternative

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

Chris,

Thanks for the reply.  BTW, I have added your email address to the
authorized senders to the list, but if you are interested in joining the
list you can do so at:

<https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/opengtoolkit-developers>

Regards.

-Jim

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ope...@li... 
> [mailto:ope...@li...] 
> On Behalf Of Christophe Salzmann
> Sent: Sunday, November 09, 2003 12:19 AM
> To: rol...@ci...; Jim Kring
> Cc: ope...@li...
> Subject: Re: VISA alternative
> 
> 
> Jim, Rolf,
> 
> I second Rolf in the fact that a generic IOPort driver might 
> be a quite large project. On the other hand a serial driver 
> sounds like a reasonable starting point. Now regarding the 
> Mac, there is no serial port built-in anymore. If you want 
> one you should either replace your internal modem or use an 
> usb-serial converter. On the other hand you can "route" your 
> serial line to a bluetooth connection to talk to other 
> devices such as phone, PDAs, etc. So there will be some use 
> for such driver. There is no native parallel port on the Mac 
> (I guess you all know it) but some external hardware provide 
> this extension. I've some code for to access the serial port 
> that worked quite well under OS9, I haven't done anything 
> with OSX, but I guess this should not be too difficult. I 
> guess the first step will be to define what functionalities 
> we want in this driver and then see what can be done under 
> each platforms.
> 
> I'll explore what is possible under OSX and let you know
> 
> Have a good week-end
> 
> Chris 
> 
> 
> > From: Rolf Kalbermatter <rol...@ci...>
> > Reply-To: rol...@ci...
> > Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2003 23:55:41 +0100
> > To: 'Jim Kring' <ji...@ji...>
> > Cc: chr...@ep..., 
> > ope...@li...
> > Subject: RE: VISA alternative
> > 
> > Jim Kring [mailto:ji...@ji...] wrote:
> > 
> >> 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.
> > 
> > Well, first as I stated earlier on Info-LabVIEW I do not think that 
> > the $395 is for a VISA runtime license but rather for the 
> entire VISA 
> > software, with development libraries, documentation, T&M Explorer, 
> > VISA Interactive Control and whatever there is. Anything 
> else would be 
> > stupid and completely unlogical to explain, as you can buy some NI 
> > products which come with VISA for not much more than that amount.
> > 
> > Second I was thinking about creating an OpenG PortIO driver which 
> > supports both the slow but simple register access of the NI 
> solution 
> > as well as an alternative high speed access, which needs some prior 
> > intialization. I have all the information and even some 
> code for Win32 
> > here but need to clean it up and prepare a proper LabVIEW 
> solution for 
> > it. It will be a source code release but since you need a 
> Windows DDK 
> > installed to compile it, I don't think there will be many people 
> > trying to compile it themselves, so a pre- compiled binary will be 
> > provided as well. I have not a very good idea about how to go to 
> > implement the same under Linux, although it shouldn't be that 
> > difficult, but for Mac I'm completely clueless, nor if there is 
> > actually any possible need for this on the Mac. After all you don't 
> > have LPT and COM ports there ;-)
> > 
> > Third trying to write a OpenG Serp driver is a pain of a 
> thing to do. 
> > Doing so for one plattform is already quite a serious project, but 
> > trying to support Win32, Linux, and Mac OS X is most 
> probably a major 
> > undertaking, requiring more commitement from several people 
> than most 
> > of us are willing and able to do. You would have to 
> abstract the Win32 
> > COMM API on one hand, the Linux device interface on the 
> other and the 
> > Macintosh device driver interface (or can one maybe use the Unix 
> > device interface without loosing to much control), which are 
> > completely different in their design, interface, and 
> abstraction. Of 
> > course one could still use the disappeared Device IO Control nodes, 
> > which LabVIEW still supports in 7.0. But there are a number 
> of issues. 
> > The Device IO Control interface in LabVIEW is built to 
> interface with 
> > the Mac Device Manager and can actually be used to call 
> virtually any 
> > Mac OS device driver although it never was really used for anything 
> > but the serial port drivers. On Windows the famous serpdrv 
> acts as a 
> > translation between the Mac OS Device Manger interface used 
> in LabVIEW 
> > and the native Win32 COMM API. The architecture of this translator 
> > driver has never been published and depends on some internal
> > tools only available by NI, but has some similarities with 
> creating CINs.
> > On Linux I'm not exactly sure if a similar serpdrv exists 
> or if the LabVIEW
> > Device IO Interface nodes map directly to the unix device 
> driver interface.
> > Problem is, that I'm fairly sure that NI tries to 
> completely disable support
> > for this interface in one of the next major releases.
> > So the only viable solution would really be over a shared 
> library interface
> > which in itself should work quite fine as proven in lvzlib 
> and to a lesser
> > extend in labpython.
> > Neverthless serial port programming on Win32 API level in a 
> generic way, and
> > not just for a particular device, is anything but pleasant, 
> and other systems
> > won't be much simpler here.
> > 
> > Rolf Kalbermatter
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
> 
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