Appendix B
Common Questions
©
National Instruments Corporation
B-3
How can I determine the serial number and hardware revision of the
VXIpc controller?
Run vxitedit and select the
VXIpc Configuration Editor
. The opening
screen displays the serial number and hardware revision of the VXIpc.
Which NI-VXI utility program must I use to configure the VXIpc
controller?
Use the vxitedit utility to configure the VXIpc. You do not need to run
vxitedit if you are satisfied with the default settings. Refer to Chapter 3,
, for complete details on using the configuration
editors.
Which NI-VXI utility program must I use to perform startup Resource
Manager operations?
Use the Resman utility to perform startup Resource Manager operations.
This utility uses the settings configured in 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. You can
access this information using the NI-VXI system configuration functions
described in detail in Chapter 2,
Function Reference
, of the
NI-VXI
Programmer Reference Manual
.
Resman reports errors (such as “Unknown directory”) if the
nivxi/tbl
directory is not found. By default, this directory is
/ide0/nivxi
on your
VXIpc hard drive. To use the default setting if you are not booting from
/ide0
, you need to mount the hard drive as follows:
-> usrAtaConfig 0,0,"/ide0"
To change the path NI-VXI uses for these files, set the environment
variable
NIVXIPATH
as follows:
-> putenv("NIVXIPATH=your_path")
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
communication system is operational.
To test individual devices, you can use the 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
