Starting Download..
save Save

Keysight Driver Migration Tool

For National Instruments LabVIEW 2011

When you migrated from an older version of National Instruments LabVIEW to the latest version (2011), the NI installation wizard did not migrate your existing instrument drivers to the new instr.lib folder (this is the special folder in the LabVIEW installation path where instrument drivers reside). It might not be apparent that this is a problem until you start LabVIEW 2011 and find that the instrument driver pallet is missing a good number of the instruments you wish to control. It is up to the end user to migrate the drivers that they wish to use in the new version of LabVIEW. But, knowing precisely where the drivers reside, where they should be copied to (depends on the OS version), what associated help files are installed (and where they reside) for the drivers, and then following a methodical approach to copy the associated files one at a time into their new destinations, can turn into a tedious project…

At least for Keysight instrument drivers, there is a straight-forward solution. The new Keysight Driver Migration Tool, which is actually a LabVIEW 2011 VI, can migrate instrument drivers to your new LabVIEW installation for you. Furthermore, the migration tool can find additional LabVIEW drivers for Keysight instruments on the hard disk whether or not they were ever actually loaded into the instrument pallet in a previous LabVIEW installation. The ability to seek out additional Keysight instrument drivers is important as current Keysight driver installers don't have a specific option for installing drivers for LabVIEW 2011. The newest Keysight driver installers do provide LabVIEW 2010 installation options and 2010 drivers are compatible with 2011, so it is just a matter of migrating those 2010 version drivers into the 2011 LabVIEW installation. LabVIEW 2011 will be supported in a future version of the driver installation framework, but for now this migration tool provides a simple work-around.

The instructions below will give you the brief highlights on using this tool once you have LabVIEW 2011 installed on your PC.

 

1. Open AgMain.vi:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



You will notice that in the "Main" tab you really only have a couple user inputs: the previous version of LabVIEW "From LabVIEW Version?" which you'd like to migrate drivers from and the current LabVIEW instrument library / help paths. It is unlikely you would want to change the target paths that are identified automatically for the latest version of LabVIEW, but you may want to run the program a second time with the "8.x" selection in the "From LabVIEW Version?" selection box to pick up any drivers that you may have had in LabVIEW installtions pre-dating 20xx versions (once the program is running, changing the selection box for "From LabVIEW Version?" will have no effect).

2. Run AgMain.vi:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 





The program will quickly go out and find the drivers for Keysight instruments and their associated help files in the middle two lists (these reside outside the LabVIEW installation path). It will also find drivers (Keysight ones as well as those from other vendors) that are in the instr.lib of the previous LabVIEW installations (the list on the right). Because there is no specific way to identify which help files are linked to a given instrument driver in the instr.lib folder, only the instrument drivers from previous LabVIEW instr.lib folders will be migrated (NOT including any help files).

3. Press the "Migrate Drivers" button:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 





The program will copy (not move) drivers and help files into the new specified LabVIEW version paths. The program will prompt the user with information if any over-write condition needs to be verified before actually over-writing an existing file.

4. Upon completion review the "Status" tab for a list of the operations completed:




 

 

 

 

 

 




The complete Zip file including all the Virtual Instrument files (*.vi) can be downloaded from the URL below.

Was this helpful?


Didn't find what you're looking for?