ni-visa libraries for cpp program requirement for Raspberry Pi ?

[sanjeev553]

I am using https://www.digikey.in/en/products/detail/rakwireless-technology-limited/raspberry-pi-4-model-b-4gb/...  R-PI .

For this i want Ni-visa libraries for my cpp application to run . From where i can get these libraries for this specific R-PI .

Is there need of some specific OS for that ?   

[rolfk]

NI doesn’t provide NI VISA for ARM based targets except their own Zynq7000 based real time targets and most likely also Apple Silicon Macs.

And no the Hobbyist Toolkit, while installing on a Raspberry Pi is possible, is almost certainly not the way you want to go. This installs a NI Realtime compatible Debian distribution in a separate chroot environment effectively creating a new virtual machine inside the Raspberry Pi host OS. Inside that NI VISA is available but you need to compile and run your program inside this chroot for it to work The chroot environment is not binary compatible with your Raspian host and has no GUI either.

There are some open source attempts at a VISA library and it may work for you or not. PyVISA allows to use some of them as backend instead of NI VISA.

[sanjeev553]

i want to work with linux on my rpi can you please help me with that to run my cpp program using ni-visa library.

Which linux version i need to install for that

[rolfk]

Linux does not come with any VISA library preinstalled. And you can't just point your Linux distribution at a NI repository to download NI VISA from there. NI has NI-VISA installers for Redhat, SUSE and Ubuntu Desktop systems but only for x86/x64 hardware. Your Raspberry Pi uses an ARM Cortex A CPU and the only driver libraries NI has for this hardware platform are the ones for their own ARM based realtime targets (which all use the embedded ARM CPU in the Xilinx Zynq FPGA chip). However these drivers are compiled for the specific ARM softfp ABI 32-bit architecture used by NI on these targets which use software floating point emulation and your Raspberry Pi runs a hardfp compiled Linux kernel and would fatally fail on trying to load the NI drivers.

This means you have to compile your own VISA drivers from some Open Source projects and while they do exist, their maintenance is sometimes not that good.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/openvisa/ is an attempt which seems to have stopped around 2005.

librevisa is even worse as there is no public project page anymore and from what I found it was in its early stages before getting abandoned.

[rolfk]

Thanks for the summary. Sounds a bit like an AI echo of my post just before yours, admittingly in a somewhat more concise form.