Photonics Ind. LASER Controller? ANyone?

[IEC]

Hey Everybody!

I'm just wondering if anyone on these boards has used labview to control a Photonics Industries laser diode driver before.  It's no different from other labview apps, Photonics just doesn't give me any help on the programming end and so it's been tough tryin to figure out the specifics about 232 comms with the thing!

Specifically its a diode driver used to control a 16 W ND:YVO4 laser head, rs232 comms.

Thanks

jonathan

[unclebump]

If it came with a program/demo to use with the controller, you can use portmon to reverse engineer the code.

http://www.sysinternals.com/utilities/portmon.html

[KFadgen]

Any luck with this?  We just purchased an 8W 355 Laser from them using the DS series controller.  I also have the RS232 comms with the generic software control.  Currently I'm not pushing to port something to LabVIEW, but I can see getting the question in the next month or so.

[Daniel_E]

Hey, TBoneJones!  Thanks for posting!  I noticed that this post is almost 1 year old.  I would recommend posting a new discussion forum.  I think you will get more responses this way!!  As for your issue, if you have the serial commands needed to talk to your device, you can use VISA in LabVIEW to talk to it.  The process is very easy.  LabVIEW ships with an example (Basic Serial Write & Read.vi) that shows how to do this.  If you want to continually write to and read from your device, just put a while loop around the read and write. 

Hope this helps!!

[Martin.D]

I just got one of these lasers (DC50/150 series). The RS232 is transmitted in HEXASC - what the hell is that!

The manual gives some hints of how to build transmit frames etc but I have not managed to controll the thing yet. Could be some issue with the checksum at a guess.

Anyway - anyone out there got any LabVIEW code to share yet?

TIA

-Martin

[Veda L]

Hi Martin.D,

From my research, HEXASC seems to be an ASCII string representation of Hexadecimal values.

To communicate with your laser device via RS232 in LabVIEW, you will need to install the NI-VISA driver. The NI-VISA driver is available through the NI Drivers and Updates webpage.

Referencing what Daniel E posted previously: If you have installed NI-VISA and LabVIEW, you should be able to use the LabVIEW shipped examples, such as Basic Serial Write and Read.vi to set up basic communication with your device.  

Have you tried using those LabVIEW examples? Are you able to communicate with your device?

Hope this helps!

Veda

[HollywoodGunner]

I have been given the task of communicating with a Phototonics Industries DM50 model Laser Controller as well. Have not had much luck in communicating with it. I have tried several of the examples, as well as some code from a 10+ yr.old project that seems to be similar, but still no luck. Has anyone out there been able to  achieve communication utilizing LabVIEW?

[HollywoodGunner]

I have been given the task of communicating with a Phototonics Industries DM50 model Laser Controller as well. Have not had much luck in communicating with it. I have tried several of the examples, as well as some code from a 10+ yr.old project that seems to be similar, but still no luck. Has you (or anyone out there) been able to  achieve communication utilizing LabVIEW?