On 17.02.2012 00:33, Ron Harding wrote:
so what has been your success with using standard SCPI and IVI-COM drivers in .NET?
There was no any success with .NET due to I have not tried to use it. Actually I am curious whether IVI is a solution for a thermoelectric cooler driver.
I have tried the USBTMC linux driver that I have found at the Agilent web site, then I observed that standard driver from the linux kernel works as well. (Likely I made some stupid mistake when I tried it first time.)
However, I do concur that it is difficult to deal with the system level switches, but necessary handshaking in a given system, i.e. *OPC\*OPC?, *WAI, BUSY? and other related status flags seems to work.
I should check if "*OPC?" will work just after "bla:bla:bla?" and prior to reading of the first result.
Then comes to mind is creating your own instrument simulator AND possibly your own microcontroller based instrument with your own command set using USBTMC/USB488.
Sorry, my goal is rapid development of programs that can perform certain sequence of actions and measurements for my experiments. It is accidental activity, so any simulators are irrelevant. I do not manufacture instruments, I employ them for measurements.
since this was released way back in 2002, is it considered to be an out of date standard? I don't see too much online about it these days.
It seems that non-negligible part of instruments supports USB488, although other manufacturers invent their own wheels (e.g. Coherent one per instrument).
Now I am quite happy with USBTMC driver coming with linux kernel. At the beginning I was confused by 'USBTMC Kernel Driver Documentation' from the Agilent web site. Later I realized that i/o buffers is not a problem if line buffering is set for the device. Any scripting language has a function to read a line, so everything works fine while I feed the instrument with correct commands.
When I wrote my previous message I missed that USBTMC protocol allows to retrieve only a part of device response and the driver of course implements this feature. Now I see that the EOF trick is unnecessary.
Although I still do not know a way to check if the request for data is valid and the device is ready to send the response.
-- Regards, Maxim Nikulin -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-usb" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
