National Instruments NI PXI-8183 Drivers and Software, PXI Features

Chapter 2 Installation and Configuration

Drivers and Software

Your hard drive includes a directory called images in its root that

contains software and soft copies of manuals for the peripherals. The

directory structure under the images directory is logically organized

into several levels.

In the images directory, you will find a manuals directory,

an osdirectory, and directories fo r each computer peripheral.

The manuals directory contains quick reference guides, technical

reference manuals, and National Instruments software manuals, all in

Adobe Acrobat format. To access any manual, change your directory to

c:\images\pxi-8180\manuals and list the contents of that directory.

You will see several files, one corresponding to each peripheral.

The os directory contains a subdirectory corresponding to the operating

system installed on your computer.

The rest of the directories correspond to each peripheral in yoursystem.

Within each of these directories are the drivers for the peripherals. These

files and directories are copied exactly from the manufacturer distribution

disks, so the naming conventions vary from peripheral to peripheral.

Because the naming conventions may not be completely straightforward,

National Instruments provides a text file named drivers.txt in the

c:\images\pxi-8180 directory. The drivers.txt file explains how

to install support for each peripheral. You may want to print this file for

reference when you install your peripheral device drivers.

PXI Features

The SMB connector on the NI PXI-8183 front panel can connect to or from

any PXI backplane trigger line through software. A trigger allocation

process is needed to prevent two resources from connecting tot he same

trigger line, resulting in the trigger being double-driven and possibly

damaging the hardware. At the time of this manual’s publication, this

software is not yet available; however, an interim trigger routing software

utility is available from National Instruments. Contact National

Instruments at ni.com/support for more information.