Do I have to use DriverLINX to program the KPCMCIA-PIO24-C?

Do I have to use DriverLINX to program the KPCMCIA-PIO24-C?

If using one of the Windows operating systems, the installation of DriverLINX is required in order for resources to be assigned to the KPCMCIA card. However, it is not absolutely necessary to use the DriverLINX driver with your programming language in order to interact with the hardware.

The KPCMCIA card is an I/O mapped card, so a simple Port I/O driver is also available (software driver in the download center) for register level control of the device. You could look in the Windows Device Manager to know the address range that has been assigned to the card. Or you could use the Logical Device Descriptor of DriverLINX to programmatically inform your application of this address assignment, and then switch to the use of the Port I/O driver. The complete hardware register map is documented in the User's Manual. Examples of this technique are available on the web site.

Motivations for register level programming with a Port I/O driver would be dynamic port configuration (output direction) from the code.

The advantage of using the DriverLINX driver over a port I/O driver is code portability to other products in the Keithley product line with digital I/O features. Also, if using the external interrupt feature of the KPCMCIA-PIO24-C, use of the driver greatly simplifies the required programming.