EABO HP3458A

[isp]

Hello!

I am attempting to communicate with DMM HP3458A using GPIB bus. NI MAX successfully found the DMM with its proper address. When I try to send commands according to the instrument’s manual (i.e. “ID?”) by using the NI 488.2 Communicator the setup proceed with timeout error iberr=EABO and the received string for “ID?” is “HP3458” as it noted in the manual of instrument. The DMM is in talk mode.

As I read from previous threads concerning EABO it seems to be very quite generic error.

I would be very grateful if someone can help me to solve the problem with this particular instrument?

Details of the setup:

NI PCI-GPIB

NI-488.2  2.4

LabView 8

MAX 4.0

Best eegards,

isp

[Jason W]

Hey isp,

I'm not sure about that instrument specifically but here are some troubleshooting steps for fixing error EABO you can try.

• The message to the instrument may contain a command that the instrument does not understand. For example, the "*IDN?" message from the previous example is only understood by IEEE 488.2 compliant instruments. If your instrument is an older, non-IEEE 488.2 compliant device, then it will not understand "*IDN?", so it will not generate a message string for you to read from the instrument.
  
• The instrument may use a particular EOS (end of string) character as its termination method, but you may forget to append this termination character to your message. For example, if your instrument expects a linefeed as the EOS character, then "ID?" will not work, but "ID?\n" (where \n represents a linefeed in IBIC) will.
  
• You may expect to see EOI (end or identify, one of the five bus management lines) as the termination method, but if the instrument does not set the EOI line when it finishes sending its message, any read operation that you perform will time out.

You might want to contact HP to see what the termination character is for your device.  If you don't have the proper termination character at the end of your commands (*IDN? included) then you will get a timeout error.

I hope this helps

Best regards,

Jason W
Applications Engineer
National Instruments

[NathanT]

You also might want to give the IVI driver with LV wrapper a try.  The beauty of using instrument drivers is that you don't have to learn all of the commands for the instrument.  We should have a new LabVIEW Plug and Play driver out in the next couple of months.

NathanT

[jjp377]

In the hp3458a plug and play driver the Initialize.vi includes a termination character that might be the problem.