National Instruments ENET Serial Controllers

The ENET to RS-232 and ENET to RS-485 products allow you to have the Serial controller box situated at a different location from your workstation. The workstation communicates over TCP/IP to the Serial controller box, which in turn communicates to the devices connected over the Serial bus. On most Windows operating systems, you can map each port on the controller box to a local port on the workstation, such as COM5.

NI-VISA currently natively supports communicating with these Serial controller boxes on Linux x86, Windows, LabVIEW RT, LabVIEW PDA, and Mac OS X. Because you cannot map the remote Serial ports to local Serial ports on the UNIX workstations, you must specify the controller's hostname and the remote Serial port number directly in the resource string. This is also valid on Windows but is unnecessary if you have created a local Serial port mapping. The resource string for these products is "ASRL::<hostname>::<remote Serial port number>::INSTR". The hostname can be represented as either an IP address (dot-notation) or network machine name.

The communication settings discussion above applies to the ENET Serial controllers as well.