Interfacing Labview and a 44426a counter board

[clkwk]

I am trying to use an HP 3497a with an HP 44426a reciprocal counter. I am having trouble getting it do do anything. I can have the 3497a read voltages, temperatures, etc... but when I try to use the counter board I can not get anything to work. I am trying to use the drivers provided on the web to run the board but I might want to write my own. The main problem I am having is that I don't not have any good manuals other then sevice manuals on the 44426a counter.
Brent

[AnalogKid2DigitalMan]

Manuals Plus may have a programmers manual or maybe try Agilent?

[JLS]

Hello,

How are you connected to the instruments?... via serial or GPIB perhaps?

If you can reply with more details I can likely help you! The drivers should work, but to start you can try something more fundamental. For example, if you are connecting via serial or GPIB (or any of a few other interfaces), you will be able to use the NI-VISA API in LabVIEW to communicate with it. If you can post an example of a command which the instrument will respond to (likely a mneumonic string, such as *idn? which usually commands the instrument to respond with a description of itself), along with how you are connecting to the instrument (if serial then note which com port you're connecting to, and if GPIB then the board index your board populates with and the primary and secondary address of the instrument), then I can help you write a quick program to get going!

Thank you,

Best Regards,

Jassem

[clkwk]

Thanks for the help but I figured out my problem. Its seems that the 3497A need a Rom chip to be installed in slot U12 on its main controller board. It must have been an add in you need to allow the 3497A to communicate to the counter board. I did not find this in any of the manuals we had but I found the extra chip and installed it. Everything runs as it should. Thanks!

Brent

[clkwk]

Hello,

I thought I had solved my problems but I have run into another one. I am going to layout what I am trying to do.

What I want to do is read several voltage/temperature measurements. Then every x time I want to close an actuator, set my counter to 0 and read the same voltage/temperature measurements plus the counter value for x time. Then I want to open the actuator and go back to the beginning. Everything works fine accept for reading the counter value. I get a standard file I/o error when the vi tries to read the counter value(error 6). If I run my sub vi to read the counter it works fine. If I delete the subroutine from the larger vi the larger vi works fine.

[clkwk]

Wronge file uploaded

[Emilie S.]

Hi Brent:

I don't believe error 6 in this context is the generic file I/O error, but instead the 488.2 error (I/O operation aborted.) It is hard to tell why this is happening without having the instrument, but you should be sure that you know what state your instrument it is before you try to execute the troublesome command. Because the whole program works without this sub VI and because the sub VI works independently leads me to believe this error is a result of something happening on your instrument. Again, I'm not sure exactly what is going wrong, but this may just be a problem with the order you are doing things. You may need to just systematically strip your code down to find out the exact cause of the error.

Regards,

Emilie S.

[clkwk]

To all those that helped thanks!!

The problem was happening b/c i was using the wrong write mode in the GPIB write Vi.