Creating Runtime Installer for VI with VISA Read VI

Question

Greetings Fellow Users,
Please let me know which 'ADDITIONAL INSTALLERS' the  LabView RunTime engine requires in order to run a VI that reads from the built-in serial port (COM 1) of a Windows XP PC.  For instance, I include LabView Run-Time engine 8.0.1 to creat an installer for the VI.  If I want to load and run this .exe on a PC that has no other NI software, do I need to include any of the following as 'ADDITIONAL INSTALLERS':
->NI-SERIAL 1.8?
->NI-VISA RUNTIME 3.4?
->NI-DAQmx 8.0?
What does the NI-VISA RUNTIME do anyways?  Also, when I do include some of these, I have to dig out my LanVIEW installations CDs and they are loaded from teh D:\.  What is the cleanest way to load these onto my HDD so that LabView will select these automatically.
Thank you. 

Answer 1

FLT CTRL 6 wrote:
Greetings Fellow Users,
Please let me know which 'ADDITIONAL INSTALLERS' the  LabView
RunTime engine requires in order to run a VI that reads from the
built-in serial port (COM 1) of a Windows XP PC.  For instance,
I include LabView Run-Time engine 8.0.1 to creat an installer
for the VI.  If I want to load and run this .exe on a PC that has
no other NI software, do I need to include any of the following as
'ADDITIONAL INSTALLERS':
->NI-SERIAL 1.8?
->NI-VISA RUNTIME 3.4?
->NI-DAQmx 8.0?
What does the NI-VISA RUNTIME do anyways?  Also, when I do
include some of these, I have to dig out my LanVIEW installations CDs
and they are loaded from teh D:\.  What is the cleanest way
to load these onto my HDD so that LabView will select these
automatically.
Thank you. 
->NI-SERIAL 1.8?
This is the driver used for serial port controller boards and
interfaces from NI. You do not need that software when trying to access
built in serial ports or ports on interface cards from other
manufactureres than NI.
->NI-VISA RUNTIME 3.4?
This is the software LabVIEW uses to talk to all kinds of IO interfaces
including serial ports. This is what you will need. Runtime means it is
a stripped down version without LabVIEW, C, VB, Delphi and whatever
development bindings and examples etc.
->NI-DAQmx 8.0?
This is the software driver for NI data acquisition devices (analog IO, digital IO, counter , timers).
These are all to be considered drivers and (very maybe apart from
NI-VISA) it is usually not a very good idea to include drivers into the
application installer. If you use them your user is likely to have
bought his own kind of hardware and no matter if he happens to have
bougt the newest SuperPCI interface board with 256 ultra-high-speed
serial ports over wireless connections or an old standard PCI board
with 2 RS-232 interfaces they both will have come with a CD that is
appropriate for that device, whereas the NI-Serial driver you included
is only appropriate for NI serial boards that are still AND already
sold at the moment when that driver was released. The same applies for
any other driver software.
NI_VISA being able to connect to standard built-in serial ports could
be considered different but it isn't really. I have included NI-VISA on
application installers in the past only to find out that the included
NI-VISA version did not run or not run reliably on newer machines with
new OS versions, so we had to point the customer to the NI site to
download the newest version anyhow, or even burn a new CD with updated
NI-VISA versions and express ship it.
Basically including any kind of driver software in the application
installer may seem like a good idea but will usually cause lots of
additional support after some time due to incompatibilities with newer
OS versions, new hardware, etc.
Rolf Kalbermatter
Rolf Kalbermatter
CIT Engineering Netherlands
a division of Test & Measurement Solutions