Do I need a NI serial device?

I am working on an application which involves reading pressure data from two pressure gauges (differential and vacuum).
My PC has two free serial ports. My questions:
1) Can I use the PC serial ports or is it advisable to opt for a NI 2-port serial device? Reason?
2) If you suggest that I go ahead with existing PC serial ports, then, can I still use the power of LabVIEW and VISA to read and display data from these ports?
I have LabVIEW 6.1 professional.
Thanks!
- Gurdas
[email protected]
Gurdas Singh
PhD. Candidate | Civil Engineering | NCSU.edu

Thanks Chris. That helped!
Find below replies to your inputs. Feel free to provide any further inputs and suggestions.
- All devices are RS-232
- No. All devices are slower than 115.2K
- No, we do not need deep FIFOs. The application is simple and involves acquiring data from two pressure gauges at slow intervals of say once every 5 minutes.
- I am not sure. What do you advise?
Do you think I need to invest in NI hardware?
Can I save money by using built-in COM ports and still leverage the power of NI LabVIEW?
- Gurdas
[email protected]
Gurdas Singh
PhD. Candidate | Civil Engineering | NCSU.edu

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As tbob pointed out, the architecture will be fully dependent on the exact details of the problem. That being said, I do have my two cents to put in. In my work, I deal a lot with serial communication (too much, in my opinion); in some instances, I am dealing with the same device on different machines and in other instances, different devices talking on different ports on the same machine. Regardless of what the implementation is, you will find that there is a lot of commonality to be found in serial IO (open port, close port, configure port, send ascii command, receive ascii data, block simultaneous attempts to R/W, etc, etc) that is really independent of implementation. To me, this just screams for an object-oriented approach. The ability to reuse or change the details of the code while limiting changes to the interface itself is awesome. In your case, if you have 8 similar devices, I see 8 instances of a class which inherits properties from a Serial IO superclass; if we are dealing with different types, then you can exploit the inheritance features of objects to basically call 8 instances of different children of the Serial IO superclass.
All that being said, I think some of the details are missing as tbob pointed out. However, instantiation of 8 objects will prevent some of the issues that might be associated with asynchronicity as all of the properties and methods would be associated with an instance.
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MSR Consulting, LLC

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Attachments:
blocking_vi.png ‏27 KB

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