Agilent 8614x Driver Problems

[jrpe]

Hi, Im a university student on co-op and I'm new to labview, I've been teaching myself for a couple of weeks. Im trying to write a program that interacts with the Agilent 86142A Optical Spectrum Analyzer to set some parameters, run some scans, and download the trace. Everything after that I think I can figure out. I wrote a fairly simple VI to do this, with the driver set up (I thought properly) but every time I opened the VI I was getting the error "This application failed because VISA32.dll was not found." for every sub VI that I was using from the driver. Reinstalling Labview did not help this problem, so I decided the error was probably with the driver, so I uninstalled both the driver and labview. I reinstalled Labview, but when i go to reinstall the driver, I get the error "gpib-vdd.dll. An installable Virtual Device Driver failed," I redownloaded the driver and tried to install the newly downloaded driver, but I got the same error. I think this might be related to the fact that I have no GPIB card or GPIB connection in my computer as of now, but Im not entirely sure why that would affect the installation of the driver (This also makes it impossible to properly test my program with the instrument). Any suggestions for what could be causing these errors?

Thanks

Jeff 

[Dennis_Knutson]

Just to confirm something, is this the driver you downloaded and you actually had to go to Agilent to get it? If that's the case, then instead of installing/re-installing LabVIEW, you should have checked the other item under the Required Software listing on the NI site. NI-VISA is a high level api that is used to communicate to GPIB/USB/VXI/Serial/Ethernet/etc. instruments. This is included on the LabVIEW drivers CD and the latest version can be downloaded from here. You will eventually need to install the GPIB driver when you get the board but you could try installing the latest now to see whether it fixes the problem when trying to install the Agilent driver.

[jrpe]

Yes that is the driver I downloaded, thanks, I will try doing what you said and post again with the results! thanks

Jeff

[jrpe]

Ok so I installed those files (the VISA and GPIB updates) and I also reinstalled the labview device driver reference cd, and doing that allowed me to install the Agilent driver no problem. Once I updated the drivers in labview, I am no longer getting errors with the sub VIs. I'll have to wait until I get the GPIB card before seeing how it works with the OSA though. But thanks a lot!

Jeff