Fixing connectivity issues on the SR510 over GPIB

[Ebele_Obijiofor]

Hi Rich,

Unfortunately, I am not familiar with this instrument, but have you tried some of the other suggestions that GPIB Guru posted? It looks like different people have been successful with different combinations of those. Thanks!

Regards,

Message Edited by _Belle on 04-10-2007 07:00 PM

[RichardG]

Hi Belle,

Thanks for your reply.

I've tried nearly all  of the other suggestions on the thread with no success.
I had some success yesterday using a USB-GPIB interface instead of the old PCI card that was in the computer. I've had no problems with the card when controlling other instruments, but maybe the SR510 is particularly fussy...

If this approach works I'll put the details on here, for the record.

[IQC_Jeremy]

I would just like to add (for search engines) that this thread applies to the SR530 aswell. I am having success with prepending a garbage character (*) to all commands that I send.

[Fogging]

I accidently wrote a space-character in front of a command and suddenly everything worked just fine.

[IQC_Jeremy]

Has anyone tried connecting other instruments by GPIB as well as the SR510/SR530?

As soon as I connect any other powered instrument to my GPIB-USB-HS controller, the 'prepending method' no longer works, and all messages that the SR530 receives (viewed from rs232 echo session) are a mess of random ASCII characters.

[Sarah_R]

IQC_Jeremy,

Just to clarify, you were initially adding a garbage character to all commands you sent and now when you connect to other instruments you are getting random ASCII characters? What do you mean by random ASCII characters? What are you expecting to see? Do you get any errors? What is the instruments that you are connecting?

[IQC_Jeremy]

Hi Sarah,

Thanks for taking a look at this, but I don't think there is anything wrong on the NI side.

Here is a list of behaviours I have observed using LabView / NI Instrument Communicator and the RS232 echo terminal. The echo is supposed to just echo everything the unit receives via GPIB over the serial connection, so if I send 'X6', I expect to see 'X6' appear in my serial session:

• GPIB-USB-HS attached directly to the back of the SRS530, no other instruments attached
• The first character of command is consistently not received by the unit, if you want to work around this, you can prepend any single character to the desired command
• GPIB-USB-HS attached to a 1m GPIB cable and to the SR530, no other instruments attached
• All commands work perfectly, no characters are dropped
• GPIB-USB-HS attached to the SRS530 and another instrument with 1m GPIB cable
• As soon as the other instrument's power is connected, the commands to the SR530 are no longer received properly. For instance I will try to write the command 'X6' multiple times, and each time I send it I see a (seemingly random,) different result: '<blank>', 'X', '<double quotes>', 'P&', 'X','6','&' and so on...
• Commands to the other unit are received and executed successfully.
  
• I have tried an XL3120 frequency counter, and an Agilent 34401A multimeter as the second intrument -- same results.

I didn't really encounter any errors per se, but if I tried to read the result after one of the truncated or garbled commands, there would be a timeout since the unit never understood the command.

Some other observations

• I tried to solder the 270 pF cap to the GPIB chip, as suggested by this and other threads, only to find that the cap was already there, so they must be doing that at the factory now!
• I have also tried to get some help from SRS, they informed me that their units are calibrated through GPIB so there can't be anything wrong with it.

So I am basically wondering if anyone else has tried this and got it working?

[Albert.Geven]

Hi

Reading what GPIB-Gura has said in october 2006 already, it is clear that this instrument violates the gpib specificcation.
And the argumen from srs that they calibrate with gpib so that all is ok is nonsens because you also can communicate with the instrument
when no other instruments are attached. Adding an instrument to gpib only shows that srs is wrong.

I advise to either use another instrument from a serious vendor! or use a separate gpib interface just for this old and bad handshaking instrument.

[Chernyshev]

I connected sr510 to my PC with installed LabVIEW 8.5 on OS Win XP and have got similar problems. It was not possible to work with downloaded driver.

Throgh VISA Interactive Control I could send only write commands and sr510 fulfilled the command and ERR LED was blinking. Read commands remained always with timeout error.

After I set 6th switch on SW1 on rear panel up (to shut off RS232 echo)  it is possible to send commands and get responce through VISA Interactive Control.

I replaced the GPIB-write /read blocks with VISA write/read blocks (and adressing) in downloaded driver and it works now.

[Albert.Geven]

congratulations and compliments on trying this out.

so only rs232 is working and the old standard gpib is still a problem for stanford research.