AIM Driver Installation for PXI LinuxRT

Issue Details

When using AIM board for communicating over ARINC 429 or MIL-STD-1553 protocol, the driver or BSP (Board Support Package) needs to be installed on the RT target device as well. Nevertheless, NI-MAX doesn't list any AIM Driver.

Solution

The main reason for that is that you probably don't have the feed to point to the right location. NI-LinuxRT drivers are now integrated inside a base image that usually contains the feeds paths. For this particular boards, it is under a folder named "3rd Party". Use the following steps to activate or add this feed.
 

1. Right-Clicking Software under your PXIe system and going to Advanced > Manage Feeds

 

2. Enter your username and password if prompted
3. Find ni-third-party in the list of feeds and click the edit icon in the Actions column

If it does not exist, you can manually add a new feed. You can put any name, but the location should point to the location as follow : https://download.ni.com/ni-linux-rt/feeds/2021.8/ni-third-party/
To ensure the path is correct, you can type it on the search bar of your favorite Web browser. You should observe similar result


Some NI Linux RT Base image may not contain "ni-third-party" folder. If this is your case, then you can add a feed of another version. While this is not advisable for other drivers for compatibility reasons, this is an acceptable workaround for this 3rd party drivers if it is missing on your base image version.

4. Tick the Enabled box for the feed

 

5. Click Update and then Close
6. Now Right-click on Software under your PXI system and select Add/Remove Software
7. With third-party feeds now enabled, you will now see an option to add AIM Drivers. Tick this option and click Review changes. Note: AIM drivers are named "429-linux-bsp" and "mil-std-1553"
8. After a few seconds, click Continue
9. When the installation is complete you will have successfully added driver support for the AIM cards.

Note, even with the driver installed, the AIM cards will still not show up in NI MAX.

Additional Information

For PXI systems not connected to Internet, you can follow this knowledge base Installing Software to Offline NI Linux Real-Time Targets - NI to install offline packages.

As described in point 3, some base image may not contain 3rd party drivers. In this situation the workaround previously mentioned does not apply and you need to select the NI Linux RT Base Image version that contains these drivers.

For NI VersiStand users, you need to refer to the following documentation : VeriStand and NI Linux Real-Time Base System Image Compatibility - NI that lists the compatibility between NI VeriStand version and Linux RT base Image.

In rare cases, you might be in this situation where PXI is offline, the compatible base image doesn't not contain 3rd party drivers and you can't migrate to newer VeriStand version. As an example, let's consider that you are using NI VersiStand 2020R5 that require the base image 20.7 which doesn't have the AIM drivers. As a workaround you can apply following steps:

1. Download and install the offline base image 20.7
2. Download and install the offline base image 21.8 that contains this 3rd party drivers
3. Install the base image 21.8 on the PXI NI-LinuxRT target. This will install NI-VeriStand 2020R6 and the AIM drivers
4. Because you need VeriStand 2020R5, you need now to uninstall the current version of VeriStand to revert to 2020R5 while keeping the AIM driver. For that you can run the following commands when connected in SSH to the target:
   • opkg remove ni-veristand-engine
   • opkg remove ni-veristand-common
   • opkg ni-veristand-model-framework-runtime
5. Copy the same ipk files from your PC to the target. They should be located in "C:\Program Files\National Instruments\RT Feeds\21.8.0\ni-labview-2020"
6. In the SSH console, go where you copied these files and run the following commands : opkg install ni-veristand-engine.  This should install the two other dependent package
7. Now you can observe from NI MAX that NI-VeriStand 2020R5 is installed and the AIM driver as well