816x driver/wrapper

[pchilds]

The 816x agilent wrapper functions for LabVIEW 7 & 8 specify GPIB for communication. Why is this the case when the instrument itself (8163B in my case) has RS232, a parallel port and a LAN interface as well? I currently don't have a GPIB card spare and was intending to set up communication using RS232. In previous LabVIEW versions the library conversion had the option of selecting either RS232 or GPIB (as shown in the agilent programming manual). How come functionality has been removed in these more recent LabVIEW versions?

[nyc_(is_out_of_here)]

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@pchilds wrote:

In previous LabVIEW versions the library conversion had the option of selecting either RS232 or GPIB (as shown in the agilent programming manual).

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What exactly do you mean by this?

LabVIEW 7 is quite old.

Are you saying you have LabVIEW 4/5/6 versions of this driver???

[Dennis_Knutson]

Are you talking about this driver? That is a driver from Agilent and does not look like it has changed in 5 years. If you have an older version and it supported RS232, then the dll from Agilent changed. Nothing to do with the LabVIEW wrapper.

[pchilds]

The drivers I obtained came from this page. They are both new (~ Nov 2011). One package is for the Windows .dll and one is for the LabVIEW wrapper .llb. The .llb specifies that it is for a GPIB interface, whereas the .dll gives no specification (and according to the Agilent documentation gives the option to select either RS232 or GPIB when converting it to LabVIEW in previous versions -- labview 5 being the version instructions were given for in the manual -- this conversion feature seems to be missing in LabVIEW 8: potentially moved to a seperately distributed program).

I don't see why Agilent would remove RS232 support. Although they are in the market for GPIB cards and I wouldn't consider them above such shady marketing ploys, I think it very unlikely they would consider what they could make enough off GPIB card sales to warrant removing support from one of their more mainstream products. More likely it seems to be that the wrapper has only been built for GPIB and no-one has built a similar wrapper for RS232. In this case is there any reason why NI would only list the GPIB wrapper version?

[pchilds]

There is no actual LabVIEW driver per se. The driver provided by Agilent is a Windows .dll and needs to be converted in order to run in LabVIEW. At the time of the writing of the manual for the device the example of LabVIEW 5 was given where an instrument driver wizard was used to convert the driver to one that could be used by LabVIEW. On the first page of the setup for this conversion the user is asked to select whether to use an RS232 or GPIB interface.

[nyc_(is_out_of_here)]

I unzipped the LabVIEW wrapper library VIs. It seems that if you want to use RS232, you need to provide it the proper resource name for it.

Perhaps you should give that a try.

[pchilds]

As the input I setup the corresponding toggle box and set it to the appropriate COM port but no dice.

[nyc_(is_out_of_here)]

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@pchilds wrote:

As the input I setup the corresponding toggle box and set it to the appropriate COM port but no dice.

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I don't have a Dropdown box on the Initialize VI that I unzipeed. It is just an empty box. What did you put in there?

[Dennis_Knutson]

I don't recall the old converter giving an option for serial but I suspect that it added an option to set the com port and to configure the termination character. Look at the 34401 driver and add the code in that to the initialize function in the Agilent driver before the Call Library Function Node.

[pchilds]

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@nyc_(is_out_of_here) wrote:

I don't have a Dropdown box on the Initialize VI that I unzipeed. It is just an empty box. What did you put in there?

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The dropdown box was made available by right clicking on the top left input of the VI and selecting whichever option automatically connects up a constant value of the right data type to match.