Chapter 4
Developing Your Application
©
National Instruments Corporation
4-3
You can interact with your VXI devices by using the VIC or VISAIC utility
(VIC for NI-VXI or VISAIC for NI-VISA). You can use these utilities to
interactively control your devices without having to use a conventional
programming language, LabVIEW, or LabWindows/CVI.
Note
You can launch VIC or VISAIC from the Tools menu in T&M Explorer.
Try the following in VIC:
In the
Command
entry field, type
help vxiin
.
This help file shows you the syntax for this command, which reads VME
address space. The first argument is the access parameters for selecting the
address space, byte order, and so on. The second is the VME address to
read, and the third is the width of the data to read.
Type:
vxiin 1,0xC000,2
The
History
window shows the result of the command execution, such as:
Return Status (0): SUCCESS.
value = 0x9ff6
If the value ends with
ff6
, you have successfully read the National
Instruments manufacturer ID from the VXIpc 870 Series ID register.
Because this is the first configuration register present for all VXI devices,
the VXI device at Logical Address 0 has its manufacturer ID register
located at A16 address 0xC000
—
the beginning of the VXI configuration
space.
You may now want to read the registers from other devices in your system
using the command
vxiin
. Try reading a register from each of the devices
listed in the
Address Map View
of T&M Explorer. In this way, you can
verify that your VXIpc 870 Series controller can access each of the devices
in your system successfully.
Alternatively, you can use VISAIC to interact with your devices.
VISAIC lists the available devices, similar to what T&M Explorer displays.
By double-clicking on a given device, you can open a VISA session and
access the device through it. For more information regarding VISAIC, use
the right-click help available from all panels.
