[rescue] Need PCI DIO (National Instruments, Sealevel, etc) card!

[Robert Darlington]

It handles some of the complexity in GPIB communications.  Basically, you
open a tcp/ip connection (telnet works) and thow commands at it.  Some
commands are to control the device itself, others are to relay the GPIB
device commands to the instrument (which are also pretty non-standard and
instrument specific).   I was able to get an old Tek 7854 scope talking to a
pc in about an hour with the Prologix adapter.  The problem is that my code
will only work with this device and there are a lot of guys on the tekscopes
list with this scope and without the Prologix adapter.  I want to rewrite
the code to work with a standard interface but don't have a card to do so.

I think it would be very interesting if somebody ever came out with a GPIBFS
that worked similarly to the OWFS / One Wire File System.   The major
problems are the inability to anticipate the commands used by a particular
instrument.  I think by 488.2 standard they have to implement some common
commands, but the command to dump the value of say the X register on my
scope (which can be an array of data, a single digit, or alpha character),
will be different than the command to dump the voltage info on my volt
meter.  Also, the instruments all have different buttons that can be
"pushed" via GPIB, each with a different name and no standard naming
conventions that I'm aware of.  When coding for these instruments, there is
usually a page or two (or 10 depending on the instrument) with tables of the
commands.  Without that it would be impossible.

-Bob

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 1:06 PM, Curious George <jorge234q at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi, Bob,
>
> --- On Wed, 1/7/09, Robert Darlington <rdarlington at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Oh, these things are actually very rare, and very
>
> Yes.  I was thinking that the laptop market might have been
> a bigger target (i.e., FSE's needing to service HPIB/GPIB
> peripherals without lugging a desktop PC around)
>
> > non-standard.  I have a
> > Prologix GPIB <-> Ethernet converter, but this too is
>
> !!  I can't imagine *how* they would have implemented that
> other than as a tremendous (proprietary) hack!  :-/
>
> > very non-standard (heck, it's 0% compatible with anything
> > written for anything else).  It's easy to use though, heh.
>
> Does it map the device to some simple file system form
> that can be mounted?  Or, do you have some "special"
> (and non-portable) software to talk to it?
>
> --don
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