Chapter 1
Introduction
ENET-232 and ENET-485 Series User Manual
1-6
ni.com
You can use the serial server software to add COM ports to your computer.
The software makes the serial ports on the serial device server appear as
standard COM ports under Windows 2000/NT. After installing the
software, using the serial ports is similar to using standard Win32 COM
ports. Furthermore, any program using the communication interface can
use the serial device server as if it were a local COM port.
Linux
x
86/Solaris 2.
x
On Linux
x
86/Solaris 2.
x
, you can use the NI-VISA Application
Programming Interface (API) to control the serial ports on the serial device
server. NI-VISA is the National Instruments implementation of the
industry-standard Virtual Instrument System Architecture (VISA)
specification. Appendix F,
, compares
NI-VISA to the UNIX serial API and explains why the NI-VISA API was
chosen. (The
NIvisa
subdirectory of your installation also contains more
information about NI-VISA.) Using NI-VISA, you can obtain a maximum
baud rate of 460.8 kbits/s for the ENET-485 and 230.4 kbits/s for the
ENET-232.
The software includes the following components:
•
NI-VISA run-time engine
•
NI-VISA ANSI C development header files
•
NI-VISA configuration utility (
visaconf
) for configuring
NI Ethernet devices and serial ports
•
NI-VISA Interactive Controller (
NIvisaic
) for interactive API
control
•
NI Ethernet Device Firmware Update utility (
FirmwareUpdate
)
Time-Saving Development Tools
Windows 2000/NT 4.0
Your kit includes the serial server software for Windows 2000/NT. After
you install your serial device server and the serial server software, you can
use any applications that make standard Windows serial-I/O function calls.
Development environments such as Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Excel,
as well as the following National Instruments applications software
products, can access the add-in serial ports using standard serial I/O
functions.
