GPIB-USB-HS not mounting in CentOS 7 (NI-VISA-15.5.0 installed)

[yafoteer]

New to the linux life.  Done this many times in Windows.  

Using CentOS 7 in a VM on a MacBook Pro.  Also installed are VMs for OSX and Windows 7.

I want to use PyVISA to control instruments via GPIB, so I need NI-VISA installed.  I downloaded the iso image for NI-VISA-15.5.0 and got it installed, at least it finished without error.  

When I plug in the GPIB-USB-HS to the USB port, I get a message from the VM manager, asking which VM I want to connect it to.  If I select "Windows 7 64-bit", it enumerates and shows up as a device just fine, as it should.  

If I choose "CentOS 64-bit", I get nothing.  When I run ResourceManager under PyVISA, I see 4 ASRL instruments, but no GPIB.  If I connect the GPIB-USB-HS to an instrument, the instrument does not appear.  

If I look in /dev, I see no GPIB device.  I *do* see nipalk.  

I tried installing NI-488.2, but it refused to do anything becuase a newer or current version was already installed, I assume when I installed VISA.  Is that the case?

I don't know what tests to do next to diagnose or give more info to the problem.  Thanks for any advice.  

Ed K

[yafoteer]

found it - 32-bit support is not installed on my computer.  Why does the installer not catch this?  

[Reyquaza]

Hi Ed,

What are you using to communicate with/run the VM? You may need to look into how that program handles communicating with hardware. Generally, if there's an easier way to do what you're trying to do, I would recommend that path instead.

To my knowledge, 488.2 should not conflict with VISA.

Edit: Ah, it looks like you got it. 

[jerry08]

I just started to work with NI products in Linux.

I have the same problem: I installed NIVISA-15.5 and NI488.2-3.2 on CentOS7 (64bit, Kernel 3.10)  and GPIB-USB-HS doesn't mount! I want to use it for pyVISA.

My question according to the posts above: Which 32bit packages are necessary to make it works?

[Reyquaza]

Jerry,

From Ed's experience, it looks like you need 32-bit support to be installed. I'm not sure in which installation that would be installed, but can you try repairing the installation of NI-VISA and NI-488.2 to make sure that 32-bit support is installed?

[JefeL]

Unfortunately, NI-488.2 for Linux version 3.2, won’t work for 2 reasons:

1. Support for USB was dropped with 3.2 (http://www.ni.com/download/ni-488.2-3.2/4916/en/)
2. 3.2 wouldn’t even be able to install on a Linux distro with a newer kernel such as CentOS 7

NI-488.2 hasn’t supported USB starting with 3.2. Earlier versions of GPIB won’t be able to install on newer Linux distros as there is a tight matching between our driver and the Linux kernel it was built for at the time the driver was released.

[JasonSmith]

One option if you are using this on a Linux VM on a Windows or Mac host is to enable NI-VISA Server on the host. The Linux VM could then use NI-VISA to talk to the GPIB-USB-HS over the network.

What NI-VISA Features are Supported on my Operating System?

Unfortunately there is not going to be any way to use NI-488.2 with a USB GPIB adapter on CentOS 7. There is an open source driver available from a third party that provides a similar interface, but it may not be 100% compatible with your application. There may also be licensing concerns for your use-case, and I don't know whether it works with PyVISA.

Third-Party Linux GPIB Package

Finally, there is the option of switching to a different interface for use on CentOS 7. PCI-GPIB and PCIe-GPIB interfaces are fully supported if this is a desktop system, although they won't be usable if this is a VM. The GPIB-ENET/1000 could be used from any CentOS 7 system.