Motion Control via Serial Port

I have previously developed an automated video microscope application in Labview. It worked great. My setup was: NI PXI system with 1409 image board, 7344 motion controller, 7764 breakout box, stepper motors, motor drivers, and tables. Now, a customer is requiring that we use a specific brand of drivers that encompass a motion controller and are daisy-chained together. Communication will take place from a serial port, thereby bypassing the 7344. My question is: will I have to can my entire previous Labview motion/data acquisition program b/c I won't be using the 7344 controller? Or, will it be easy to specify in the program to commmunicate via the serial port rather than the card? Would this setup take place in MAX, or in the LabView applicatio
n itself? Any nuances that I should know about? Any info would be appreciated. THANX-ROB

Rob,
in this case you won't be able to use any of your motion related code. The motion VIs in LabVIEW call the NI-Motion driver dll and thus they are not hardware independant. By the way, this is not a specific disadvantage of the NI-Motion driver. In fact there is not such a thing available like a standardized interface and hardware independant motion control language.
In general you will have to use low level serial communication (VISA). That means you have to read the drive/controller manual, identify the serial command strings you need and send them to the device.
For configuration the drive vendor should provide a utility to set the necessary parameters.
On the other hand you could be lucky in the case that the vendor of the drive/controller provides h
igh level LabVIEW vis. You should check with this vendor if a LabVIEW driver is available. Still you will have to rewrite your motion related part of the code.
I'm sorry that there are no better news.
Best regards,
Jochen
NI-Germany

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Solved!
Go to Solution.

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