VirtualBench for LabVIEW 8.5

[0_o]

Hi,

VirtualBench comes with a driver for LabVIEW 2013 and above.

I need to work with LabVIEW 8.5 in this project.

Did someone try to save this driver to an older LabVIEW version?

Creating such a version is a mess since you can't "save to previous' vis that refer to files in vi.lib. Should I try and do it?

Thanks in advance

 

[hooovahh]

I've never used VirtualBench but if the drivers aren't supported, then they aren't supported.  The only thing that might help you is that sometimes in the past NI has done things like just used DAQmx for some features, and NI-DMM for others.  So if you must use LabVIEW 8.5, I'd suggest trying to find the newest version of DAQmx, and NI-DMM, and NI-Power, that work with 8.5 and install it, and see if MAX recognizes the VirtualBench at least for those features.

[0_o]

NI's support came back to me and said that actually, all the new vis I get from installing the driver/app are actually wrappers to a dll.

This dll can be wrapped from Python for all they care (https://github.com/armstrap/armstrap-pyvirtualbench updated to virtualbench15) but then they won't give support.

I thought that the meaning of this is that I can access this dll from LabVIEW 8.5 yet the support person said I can try but again I will get no support since the virtualbench requires a new Win version and LabVIEW 8.5 is not supported over a new Win version.

How comfortable lol, this claim solves lots of support issues for NI and is actually a declaration of them stopping to maintain backward compatibility since LV8.5 does work over Win10.

Soon Win7 will be at its end of life and NXT will be the only version supported. I bet you all hate Win10 for all the hardware access issues it brought with no compatible drivers. Prepare to hear: we don't support LabVIEW, only LabVIEW NXG in your configuration.

When LV17 was introduced I tried installing it next to LV 8.5 with catastrophic results (due to the change in the unified runtime) so now that I'm using LV16 next to LV8.5 I asked if installing virtualbench 17 for LV16 will harm my LV8.5.

The support guy said he doesn't think virtualbench 17 will install LV's runtime of LV17 but he said he recommends me to be on the safe side and install virtualbench 16 on LV16 (normally virtualbench 17 can install on LV16).

Anyhow, to play safe and get the support, I'm going to write an engine in LV16 for the virtualbench and access it from LV8.5 (maybe close it as a dll).

Wish me luck

[TomOrr0W]

Looking at the readme files, LabVIEW 2015 SP1 is also supported on WIndows 10 (http://www.ni.com/pdf/manuals/374715d.html) if you have issues with the 2016 versions.

[ShaunR]

1 hour ago, 0_o said:

I bet you all hate Win10 for all the hardware access issues it brought with no compatible drivers.

I hate Win 10 just for making me chase tiles around the start menu for 10 minutes trying to get them into menu folders.?

[Michael Aivaliotis]

50 minutes ago, TomOrr0W said:

LabVIEW 2015 SP1 is also supported on WIndows 10

Yes, I ran into this issue as well. I couldn't upgrade a customer PC to Windows 10 because I was using LV2014. So then I decided to upgrade to LV2018, but the customer had 1 PC running WindowsXP. yes. XP. So that aborted the whole upgrade, just for 1 PC. So the highest I could go was LV2015.

[hooovahh]

On 11/21/2018 at 11:41 AM, 0_o said:

Soon Win7 will be at its end of life and NXT will be the only version supported. I bet you all hate Win10 for all the hardware access issues it brought with no compatible drivers.

I don't share your opinion of Windows 10.  I haven't had hardware access issues, and as others have said current gen LabVIEW is supported on several operating systems.  2015 SP1 is supported on 6 different Windows OSs according to this table, that seems pretty extensive to me.  That means Virtual Bench 15.0 should work fine on XP.  Expecting Virtual Bench drivers to support 8.5 seems like a stretch since it came out 8 years before the first release of Virtual Bench (correct me if 15.0 isn't the first release of Virtual Bench)

There are things I hate about Windows 10, but the start and tile really doesn't bother me.  In the past I have installed Classic Shell to get a basic looking start experience, with a skin that looks like Windows 10.  But even on systems that I don't do this on it doesn't bother me.  Windows 8.0 with the full screen tiles did bother me, but even then most of the time I just started typing what I wanted, or pinned important programs to the task bar, or used desktop shortcuts on systems I'd deploy to.  Most users of my systems don't open the start at all, they just use the software I write anyway.  And on systems I develop on I'm free to customize it however I want.

[0_o]

Hoovahh, for home use I like Win10, I just stumbled upon various issues with it when it comes to using it for work.

The issues were:

1. No drivers - Just this month: a usb2RS232 converter didn't connect to a flash chip even though it is stated that the chipset is supported and before that, I had an issue installing LV 8.5 runtime on a Win10 NUK and had to replace it with a MiniDesk

2. and this is the main issue: NI says LV 8.5 is not supported and won't work on anything above Vista while it actually works fine on Win10 till you try to install LV 2017 next to it. This is actually an NI issue and not a Win10 issue per se 

As for the VirtualBench, if the driver is a dll and the wrapper happen to be vis I don't understand why it can't be supported on LV8.5 (ver15 is not the first one and it first supported LV13) unless it depends on MAX drivers which it doesn't if I understand correctly. 

[hooovahh]

Your usb2RS232 device is likely a counterfeit Prolific, or FTDI chipset.  The official makers of Prolific and FTDI have pushed out driver updates which disable counterfeit hardware which previously worked with the official drivers.  At one point an FTDI driver disabled the counterfeit hardware making it not work in any computer once it had be used with the official driver.  These updated drivers have been published as Windows Updates, and as a result they have stopped working unless you manually roll back drivers and force uninstall the newer ones.  Not saying this is your situation but it has been mine.  You often have no way of knowing if counterfeit chips are being used.  An update will come through and they suddenly stop working.

As for the LabVIEW thing yeah that is on NI.  But to be fair they can't support every operating system with every version of LabVIEW and the more they cut out the more resources they have for other support issues.

[0_o]

Interesting! I didn't know about the counterfeit. I user the most recent driver and even contacted the company for no avail.

As to NI, it is completely cool to stop support, I even think that many of NI's problems start from this baggage.

However, to use the Win compatibility as an excuse instead of saying they stopped the backward compatibility effort is not ok mainly since it prevented them of simply checking what will happen to a LV8.5 user that will install LV17 next to it.

I do think they should have tested it and let the user know they don't match during the installation instead of finding out LV8.5 is gone once LV17 is installed.

[Michael Aivaliotis]

Just ditch 8.5 man.

[0_o]

That requires me to upgrade a LabVIEW+.net+c+assembler Software that took 15 programmers 10 years to develop and many of those programmers are no longer working here.

I hope to get to it during the 2nd quarter of 2019