Providing a demo version

[Gammatech]

Hi,

One of our agents abroad (Europe) has asked whether we can supply a demo version of the DAQFactory program that I have written so that he can show it to potential customers. I can see two immediate problems so I thought I would run it past you guys.

The first problem is of course it needs DAQFactory to run. If he downloads the trial version from your site I believe this will not operate as a RunTime only system, and will expire after the trial period. The only solution I can see to this is we purchase RunTime systems to supply to agents with the demos. Is that correct?

The second problem is that my actual program reads a serial input once every second and parses all the data it gets into the various channels. Obviously I don't want to supply a program that needs the serial input so I assume I need to build a version without any serial routines but with simulation routines instead. When I tried this the program still seemed to have the serial device configured so do I need to remove the Device file created (.ddp i think?)

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated,

Martin

[AzeoTech]

Yes, you'd have to have DAQFactory installed. You can get a trial to open in runtime by adding the -R flag in the shortcut along with the name of your file, but as you said, it will only work for the 25 day trial period (which may be perfect for you). You could purchase runtime licenses to give to the agent, but you wouldn't want to install them on the customer machines because there is no way to remove them. I suppose you could use a hardware key to hold the license and have the customer return the hardware key. If the agents are demoing on their own computer, then just buy them a runtime license. The other option is to use DAQFactory Developer, which would not require you to purchase Runtime licenses, as they are included.

As for serial input, killing the .ddp file won't help. Instead, adjust your script not to ping the device, and set the device port to 0 to keep DAQFactory from trying to open the port. I personally would use a custom startup flag to indicate that the system was running in sim mode, that way you only have one .ctl document to manage.