Installation guide

RTX Installation

CAN-API Installation

Manual • Doc. No.: C.2001.21 / Rev. 3.0 •

Page 43 of 112

2.7 RTX Installation

RTX is a real-time extension for Windows NT/2000/XP that provides high-speed and deterministic

real-time capabilities. The extension is developed and distributed by the company ‘Ardence’.

2.7.1 Implementation

The support for an esd CAN module consists of a driver part and the NTCAN library part. The

hardware specific driver part has to be loaded for each supported CAN module the library part has to

be loaded once into the RTSS environment. Driver and library are implemented as RTSS DLL, which

means that they are RTSS processes that export functions for use by other RTSS processes, share a

common address space with other RTSS processes and accurately mirror the automatic resolution of

references to exported functions like implicitly loaded Win32 DLLs.

The driver doesn’t export any functions and an RTSS application will never reference to the driver

directly. An RTSS application will always reference to the API functions exported by the NTCAN

library described in this manual. The NTCAN RTSS DLL may be loaded without a driver to create

RTSS applications which refer to the NTCAN API even if the CAN hardware isn’t present in all cases.

2.7.2 Software Requirements and Differences to Win32

Software Requirements:

• Ardence RTX version 5.x or 6.x

Differences versus Win32 implementations of the NTCAN-API:

• Overlapped operations are not supported in the RTSS environment.

• Unlike to Win32 the Tx-timeout is a transaction timeout, i.e. the timeout is not valid for the

transmitted CAN messages but for a complete transmission job.

• Firmware update in the RTSS environment is not supported. If a firmware update is necessary, it

has to be performed in the Win32 environment with the appropriate Windows device driver.