National Instruments NI-DNET - Manual (Page 13)

Chapter 1 NI-DNET Software Overview
NI-DNET User Manual 1-4 ni.com
NI-Spy
This tool monitors function calls to the NI-DNET APIs. This tool helps in
debugging programming problems in your application. To launch this tool,
open the Software branch of the MAX Configuration tree, right-click
NI Spy, and select Launch NI Spy.
SimpleWho
To provide valid parameters for the NI-DNET open functions
(
ncOpenDnetIntf , ncOpenDnetExplMsg , and ncDnetOpenIO ), you
need to determine some basic information about your DeviceNet devices.
This information includes the MAC ID of each device, the I/O connections
it supports, and the input/output lengths for those I/O connections.
In most cases, the vendor of each DeviceNet device provides this
information, but if not, NI-DNET provides a tool that helps you determine
this information. Searching a DeviceNet network to determine information
about connected devices is often referred to as a network who, and thus the
NI-DNET tool is called SimpleWho. This tool is not a complete network
management or configuration tool. It provides read-only information about
the DeviceNet devices connected to your National Instruments DeviceNet
interface.
To launch SimpleWho, right-click the DeviceNet interface (such as
DNET0) in MAX, and select SimpleWho.
For more information on the SimpleWho tool, refer to the NI-DNET help
file in MAX. This help file can be opened using the Help button in the
SimpleWho tool itself.
NI-DNET Objects
The NI-DNET software, like the DeviceNet Specification, uses
object-oriented concepts to represent components in the DeviceNet system
(for more information about object-oriented concepts in the DeviceNet
Specification, refer to Appendix A,
DeviceNet Overview ). However,
whereas in the DeviceNet Specification objects represent a multitude of
components in DeviceNet devices, NI-DNET objects represent
components of the Windows device driver software. The NI-DNET device
driver objects do not correspond directly to objects contained in remote
devices. To facilitate access to the DeviceNet network, the NI-DNET
objects provide a more concise representation of various objects defined in
the DeviceNet Specification.