Sharing serial device from Raspberry Pi to VISA?

[Sparkette]

I have a bunch of serial devices on a Raspberry Pi, and I'd like to be able to access them as VISA devices in LabVIEW. What's the best way to share a serial device on Raspbian in a way that VISA can connect to? I know if nothing else I can just use socat and do it as a raw TCP/IP connection, but I'm wondering if there's a better way.

[PiDi]

This (controlling the VISA resource from different computer) is generally possible using VISA Server (https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z0000019LfHSAU&l=pl-PL). But I have no idea if VISA Server is even available on Linux. So chances that it is available or will run on Raspbian are closer to zero...

[Sparkette]

One alternative I thought of is running an LXI server on the Raspberry Pi. That could work, right?

[smithd]

Not VISA, but it seems simple enough to use linx? https://www.labviewmakerhub.com/doku.php?id=learn:libraries:linx:reference:labview:uart-open

 

Edited January 18, 2019 by smithd

[bbean]

you could try installing pyvisa-py (partial replacement for ni-visa backend) on the rasberry-pi and see if it can implement remote sessions eg.  visa://hostname/ASRL1::INSTR .It doesn't look too promising based on this discussion,

https://github.com/pyvisa/pyvisa-py/issues/165

but it seems to indicate if you know the address and don't rely  on the pyvisa-py resource manager it may work.

 

 

 

[smithd]

Along the same lines as the raspberry pi, its pretty annoying that NI has gotten rid of these fine old beasts: http://sine.ni.com/psp/app/doc/p/id/psp-655/lang/en

Theres obviously a ton of ethernet->serial boxes out there, but most of them seem to require local windows drivers to emulate them as local serial ports

 

[Phillip Brooks]

ser2net - shares a serial interface as a telnet compatible socket.

Here's an example setup:

https://garettmd.com/create-a-console-server-with-a-raspberry-pi.html

 

 

[Sparkette]

Thanks for your help.

As it turns out though, I'm actually just going to keep running my code on that Raspberry Pi and use LabVIEW only for an additional component. There's another serial connection I'd need to share with LabVIEW, but it's an RS-485 adapter, and as it turns out, the sbRIO-9636 I'm using has an RS-485 connection built in, so I can just use that instead.

Edited January 21, 2019 by flarn2006

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

On 1/18/2019 at 1:19 PM, bbean said:

you could try installing pyvisa-py (partial replacement for ni-visa backend) on the rasberry-pi and see if it can implement remote sessions eg.  visa://hostname/ASRL1::INSTR .It doesn't look too promising based on this discussion,

https://github.com/pyvisa/pyvisa-py/issues/165

but it seems to indicate if you know the address and don't rely  on the pyvisa-py resource manager it may work.

py-visa is a pure VISA client implementation. While the VISA API is sort of documented in the VXIpnp documents, the internal workings of VISA is not. That includes the VISA Server network protocol and all that stuff. I think the cost-usefullness analysis of trying to reverse engineer that is pretty bad as even under Windows VISA Server isn't used that often. The only platform I have ever used it with was with NI realtime controllers to access their serial ports from Windows. But that was all being NI hardware with NI drivers installed.