Instrument Driver Installation Instructions

LabVIEW 5.x - 4.1:

Each driver is compressed with either a .zip extension or a .hqx.sea extension. Files with a .zip extension are compressed archive files for Windows, Sun and HP-UX users. Macintosh users access the self-extracting archived file with the same root name but with a .sea.hqx extension.

In order for the instrument driver VIs to appear in the Instrument Drivers sub-palette of the Functions palette, the instrument drivers need to be placed in your /labview/instr.lib directory. Furthermore, the archived files contain directory information so the archives should be extracted using the store file/or folder names. This is generally a selectable option in your archiving utility. For example to extract the files for the HP34401A instrument driver using the stored directory information with PKUNZIP, enter the following command at a DOS Prompt:

In general the instrument driver will consist of one or two VI library files and one or more menu files (*.mnu). These should all be saved in a unique directory within your /labview/instr.lib directory. For example, the HP34401A instrument driver files and their relative directory structure is shown below:

The Macintosh archives will self-extract the driver components into the driver folder. The extracted folders need to be placed into the labview/instr.lib folder.

Some instrument drivers, such as the Tektronix TKTDS series oscilloscopes have shared VI libraries. These shared libraries should be stored in the /instr.lib/_shared directory. If the archived files are unzipped within the instr.lib directory using PKUNZIP's -D option, the files will automatically be stored using the correct directory structure. Macintosh archives will extract to both the driver folder and the _shared folder.

LabVIEW 3.1:

Each driver is compressed with either a .zip extension or a .hqx.sea extension. Files with a .zip extension are compressed archive files for Windows, Sun and HP-UX users. Macintosh users access the self-extracting archived file with the same root name but with a .sea.hqx extension. The instrument driver VI libraries should be uncompressed and placed within your labview/instr subdirectory.

CVI:

CVI users can unzip the files into any directory, although the cvi/instr directory provides a convenient location for all your instrument driver files.

NI-VISA:

Many of the drivers require NI-VISA to be installed. You can download the latest version of VISA from the following ftp site: ftp.natinst.com/support/visa. In addition to VISA, the appropriate device driver(s) (NI-488.2, NI-VXI, etc) also need to be installed along with the appropriate hardware.