Instrument Control Toolbox Release Notes

Known Software Problems

This section updates the Instrument Control Toolbox documentation, reflecting known software problems.

Pin Status Event

On the Microsoft Windows 98 platforms, a pin-status event is not produced when the ring indicator pin changes value.

Available Serial Ports

Windows 98

On Windows 98 platforms, you can use only the COM1 through COM4 ports. Additionally, the instrhwinfo function always indicates that these ports exist. To find out the actual serial ports that are available, examine the AvailableSerialPorts field.

• out = instrhwinfo('serial');
  out.AvailableSerialPorts
  out = 
      'COM1'
      'COM2'
  

Solaris

On Solaris, all serial ports are returned by instrhwinfo - including ports that you cannot access. For example, instrhwinfo may return the following ports.

• out = instrhwinfo('serial') 
  out.AvailableSerialPorts
  ans = 
  '/dev/term/a'
  '/dev/term/b'
  '/dev/cua/a'
  '/dev/cua/b'
  

However, only /dev/term/a and /dev/term/b are available for communicating with instruments.

Accessing Serial Ports on Solaris

If you repeatedly open and close one or more serial ports on Solaris, MATLAB will become unresponsive. To minimize the chance of encountering this problem, you should:

• Use only one serial port on your platform.
• Connect the serial port object to your instrument once per MATLAB session.

Alternatively, if you have NI-VISA installed, you can completely avoid this problem by using a VISA-serial object.

VISA Driver Limitations