Chapter 1
NI-DNET Software Overview
1-4
ni.com
NI-Spy
This tool monitors function calls to the NI-DNET APIs. This tool helps in
debugging programming problems in your application. To launch this tool,
open the
Software
branch of the MAX Configuration tree, right-click
NI Spy
, and select
Launch NI Spy
.
SimpleWho
To provide valid parameters for the NI-DNET open functions
(
ncOpenDnetIntf
,
ncOpenDnetExplMsg
, and
ncDnetOpenIO
), you
need to determine some basic information about your DeviceNet devices.
This information includes the MAC ID of each device, the I/O connections
it supports, and the input/output lengths for those I/O connections.
In most cases, the vendor of each DeviceNet device provides this
information, but if not, NI-DNET provides a tool that helps you determine
this information. Searching a DeviceNet network to determine information
about connected devices is often referred to as a
network who
, and thus the
NI-DNET tool is called
SimpleWho
. This tool is not a complete network
management or configuration tool. It provides read-only information about
the DeviceNet devices connected to your National Instruments DeviceNet
interface.
To launch
SimpleWho
, right-click the DeviceNet interface (such as
DNET0
) in MAX, and select
SimpleWho
.
For more information on the
SimpleWho
tool, refer to the NI-DNET help
file in MAX. This help file can be opened using the
Help
button in the
SimpleWho
tool itself.
NI-DNET Objects
The NI-DNET software, like the DeviceNet Specification, uses
object-oriented concepts to represent components in the DeviceNet system
(for more information about object-oriented concepts in the DeviceNet
Specification, refer to Appendix A,
). However,
whereas in the DeviceNet Specification objects represent a multitude of
components in DeviceNet devices, NI-DNET objects represent
components of the Windows device driver software. The NI-DNET device
driver objects do not correspond directly to objects contained in remote
devices. To facilitate access to the DeviceNet network, the NI-DNET
objects provide a more concise representation of various objects defined in
the DeviceNet Specification.