Error 1097 while controlling a Velmex

[armchair_engineer]

I'm using a two axis Velmex setup to quickly move a probe quickly in and out of a flame. The Velmex is supposed to move the probe into the flame, let it collect data, move it out of the flame, then repeat this process at a slightly more advanced position inside the flame. After this is finished, the second stepper motor is supposed to move the probe up and the process starts again. Halfway through the routine, however, it stops working and I wind up getting Error 1097. Why is this occuring?

Here's the VI for reference.

[johnsold]

It would help if you included the Velmex driver VI.

Lynn

[rolfk]

Could it be that your Vxmdriverlv8.vi which is not included in your zip file calls into a DLL? (Hint: I'm 99.9% sure it does).

In that case this VI is either not configured properly for the function as it is implemented in the DLL or even more fun to debug, that DLL contains a bug!

[armchair_engineer]

Sorry, couldn't post the driver last night. Here it is.

[rolfk · Accepted solution]

Nothing to see in this VI and DLL. For one a DLL is just a compiled code so there is very little to see from the DLL alone. Also a DLL does not contain any other information as to how it is supposed to be called. The implementation of the driver is terrible with all the calls in one single VI and half a dozen booleans to select which one of them to call. It deserves maybe a 6 out of 10 for functionality, a 1 for style and a 2 for cleanliness.

Without the API documentation of that driver DLL, there is absolutely nothing possible to say about the correctness of the CLN configurations. As simple as the functions look, there is still a chance that this configuration got wrong somewhere. Another a least as likely cause is that the DLL itself is poorly written too. If the LabVIEW implementation is any hint for the quality of the DLL driver implementation, then I guess it would be simpler to throw it all away and reimplement the driver purely in LabVIEW.

[armchair_engineer]

That's probably the best option, then. This is the only Velmex driver out there, and I've heard complaints about how it works.

[ColinCR]

It's obviously written by a non-LV programmer and ignores the dataflow paradigm completely.

We had dealt with it so many times in R&D that we created our own toolkit. We broke out all of the dll calls into a VI API, added utility functions, along with some examples.

http://interfaceinnovations.org/motionproducts.html

Happy to help or answer questions.
Colin