National Instruments VXI Water System User Manual


 
Appendix D Common Questions
VXI/VME-PCI8022 for Solaris D-2
©
National Instruments Corporation
Which NI-VXI utility program must I use to perform startup
Resource Manager operations?
Use the
resman program to perform startup Resource Manager
operations. It is located in the
NIVXI directory. resman uses the
settings in the Configuration Editor of
vxiedit or vxitedit. It
initializes your VXI/VMEbus system and stores the information that it
collects to the
resman.TBL file in the TBL subdirectory of the NIVXI
directory.
What can I do to make sure that my system is up and running?
The fastest method for testing the system is to run
resman. This
program attempts to access memory in the upper A16 address space of
each device in the system. If
resman does not report any problems, the
VXI/MXI communication system is operational.
To test individual devices, you can use the
vic or victext program to
interactively issue NI-VXI functions. You can use the
VXIin() and
VXIout() functions or the VXIinReg() and VXIoutReg() functions
to test register-based devices by programming their registers. If you
have any message-based devices, you can send and receive messages
with the
WSwrt() and WSrd() functions. Notice that VXIinReg() and
VXIoutReg() are for VXI devices only.
Finally, if you are using LabVIEW or LabWindows/CVI and you have
instrument drivers for the devices in your chassis, you can use the
interactive features of these programs to quickly test the functionality
of the devices.
What do the LEDs on the front of the VXI-MXI-2 or VME-MXI-2
mean?
The SYSFAIL LED shows the state of the VXIbus/VMEbus SYSFAIL
line. This line is asserted whenever any device in the chassis has not yet
passed its self test, if it has failed its self test, or if it has detected a
failure after originally passing its self test. The MXI LED indicates that
the VXI-MXI-2 or VME-MXI-2 is acting as a slave to another device
on the MXIbus, such as when the PCI-MXI-2 communicates with either
the VXI-MXI-2 or VME-MXI-2 or with another device in the chassis.
The VXI (VME) LED, when lit, indicates that the VXI-MXI-2 or
VME-MXI-2 is acting as a slave to another device in the VXI (VME)
chassis, such as when a bus master inside the chassis wants to talk to
either the VXI-MXI-2 or VME-MXI-2 or another device outside the
chassis.