Good morning all;
Over the last couple of months I've been dealing with a maddening issue related to NI-VISA drivers, NI-MAX, LabVIEW, and Windows 7 and 10.
Our production lines utilize between one and three thermal printers to print product specific labels. In setting these printers up, the NI-VISA Driver Wizard was used to create the driver. These printers, when initially plugged in, show up in Windows Device Manager as a USB Printer. With the VISA driver created and assigned, these printers readily appeared in NI-MAX. From MAX, an alias is assigned; for this example I'll use is 'Zebra'.
On some machines, MAX/Windows/whatever has a tendency to drop the alias altogether, reverting back to the original raw USB resource. This is especially prevalent first thing in the morning as the Windows 10 machines are turned on. Sometimes this happens multiple times a day; other times a machine can go weeks between an alias being dropped. Some machines have been rock solid and have never lost an alias.
Another issue that most if not all of our machines have is the numbering of the alias. Sometimes MAX will reassign a resource with another alias name. For example, if 'Zebra' has been set and the production line runs into printer issues, I'll look in MAX and the assigned alias will be 'Zebra-5.' I've written some code that deals with this issue, but I can't write anything for the completely dropped alias. There is a push to standardize all printers and cables across all production areas in the plant, so I can't just whip up band-aid fix.
Power options in the USB settings have been adjusted appropriately. I'm frankly at a loss as to the potential cause of this issue and I'm looking for input from anyone who has ever had to deal with a similar situation. I've probably left out some pertinent information with this post, so let me know if any additional info may lead to a solution.
Thanks!