I have inherited a program that runs a custom made application called via an activex node in the VI, which communicates with a flow meter. On the older computers here it runs fine ( they are XP running LV8.2) but I need to move them to new Win7 computers (running LV2013) and the transfer is not working. The VI is no longer opening the port properly and communicating with the meter. If I use the program that the meters came with to first open the port, then close that program and run my VI the VI calls the application properly, retrieves the data, and gives the output, albeit very very slowly. The way that the flowmeter outputs it's data as far as i can tell is to dump the entire block of information it has. So muddled in "press p for program" strings and "h for help" is the actual flow value, so I am thinking that the reason that the sampling is so slow is that this proprietary program is searching in the read buffer for an identifier then taking the numeric value needed from that. Does this sound reasonable? But what could be causing it to no longer open the comm port properly like it does on the XP machines? Everything else is the same, I am just trying to open it in LV2013, instead of 2006.
I have tried to make a straight forward Serial read program, but that also does not open the port properly, and I have to run the flow meter software first to get a readable port. All that program has is the COM setup and a read block and once running does output properly, but it is just dupicating what is on the screen of the flowmeter like the other program does, so I need to sift through that for the flow value if that is the only way to do it.
I have probably done a terrible job explaining this, thank you for reading this far, hopefully we can figure it out.