BE256 (older piece of HW) and NI GPIB?

[diadev]

Dear Experts!

I am attempting to communicate with a BE256 (rather old device with a GPIB interface).

It has e. g. commands like ID? (instead of *ID?) which I have encountered a couple of times in older systems.

Unfortunately, I cannot make the device talk back.

I was successful with a GPIB adapter from a different brand, but couldn't repeat the success with the NI hardware. I have toyed around with a couple of settings, both in the GUI (NI-488.2 Communicator in  the M&A Explorer), as well as via C where I had accessed a couple of other devices successfully before (typically, the NI adapter is pretty reliable and also forgiving, even when communicating with older HW like AMREL PPS-1326), but the BE256 is not answering at all.

Any ideas, hints, or need for clarification?

Best wishes,

diadev

[Curt_C]

Hi,

Try changing ome of the settings on the GPIB board properties page.

In 'Advanced' settings try changing the bus timing to 2usec.

In the  'Termination Methods' try changing the EOS/EOI settings.

Curt

[diadev]

Hi Curt!

Thx for the input!

Unfortunately, I tried all the settings of the GUI already (Measurement & Automation Explorer). Now, I didnt try the timeout yet.. so changing it from 10s to a lower value, I get my error quicker. 🙂

It seems like the writing operation does not end properly (for the device).

In the documentation, it says that the device is expecting CR+LF+EOI for reads and sending it for writes. Even though I didnt find the option of sending this at all in the GUI (how to append CR + LF??) I concatenated a string using the C interface, containing both the CR+LF. Still, it didnt work.

Plus, how shall I do this? Do a string-concat? And to what shall I set the end character?

Any ideas on how to do this with either the GUI or programmatically?

Many thanks,

diadev

[diadev · Accepted solution]

For whatever reason, it works fine now.

I keep remote asserted, append the cr+lf manually via snprintf.. and even a binary read works fine.

so.. for anyone having the same trouble, this is what worked for me:

// interface adapter configuration

ibconfig(card, IbcEOSwrt, 0x1);
ibconfig(card, IbcEOSrd, 0x1);
// enable remote mode
ibconfig(card, IbcSRE, 0x1);

// binary read (simply don't listen to EOS)

ibconfig(m_ulCard, IbcEOSrd, 0x0);
ibrd(device, (char *)data, size);
// stop reading on EOS char again
ibconfig(m_ulCard, IbcEOSrd, 0x1);