i need help communicating with a piece of equipment.

[Zemer]

hi,

i am a beginer user of Labview. 

i am trying to write a program to communicate to a EXFO PM-1100 Optical power meter.  i would like to have the program to get a reading from the equipment at a given time interval, and record it in an Excel spreadsheet.

i know i need to download the equipment driver.  can i download it from your website? 

also, would you have already a program with the list of commands that the equipment understand?

since this is the first program i attempt to put together, it will be great if you already have a similiar simple program that i can start with.

thanks for your help,

Zemer Mizrahi

[Dennis_Knutson]

NI does not have a driver for that instrument.  You can check with the vendor if they have any type of driver (LabVIEW or not).

A driver is the program with the list of commands for an instrument.

If you are not able to find a driver, you have several options. At the Instrument Driver Network you will find links that explain what a driver is, how to use one, how to create one, how to request one from NI, etc. You can contract with an experienced LabVIEW programmer who will create a driver for you. You can use the Instrument I/O Assistant to create a VI (or set of VIs) that will only implement the commands that you need or just use low level commands in your program to do the same thing.

What type of interface does the instrument have? Is it serial, GPIB, Ethernet, something else?