It may be helpful to know what hardware you are using, and in particular if it shows up in the Measurement and Automation Explorer, MAX, (for example, an NI PCI-GPIB card or GPIB-USB device). In particular, if you right click on an instrument which populates after scanning for instruments in MAX you can select Communicate with Instrument. Here, you should be sure that *idn? is in the text field and click either query or write and then read. Most instruments respond to this command with an identification string. If you clicked read first, you should receive a timeout error because you will read the GPIB and no data will have been written. You can also attempt communication using the interactive control tool, called ibic, as follows:
1. Right click on your GPIB d
evice (for example, PCI-GPIB) in MAX and select interactive control.
2. Type ibdev 0 1 0 10 1 0 and press enter(the numbers represent board index, primary address, secondary address, timeout value, EOI on last byte use, and end of string mode/byte; you can use the numbers which correpond to you system, as you may have a different board index and the instrument you are having trouble with may have a different address.)
3. You will see ud0:, now type ibwrt "*idn?" (include the quotes) and press enter.
4. Type ibrd 5 and press enter; this should return the first 5 bytes of the identification string sent by your instrument.
Definitely repost if you are still having problems!
Thank you,
Regards,
JLS
