HP3458A visual basic problems

[Mathieu_Donze]

I use a NI 488.2 card to acquire datas on a HP3458A multimeter(with VB, GPIB-32.DLL). The transfer rate between the HP3458A and the GPIB card is very slow. How to speed up the data rate of the GPIB interface? Is the GPIB interface of the HP3458A very slow.
Please help me!!!

[Randy Solomonson]

Hello-

What type of interface is being used? The USB-GPIB is quite a bit slower than the PCI-GPIB. Also, the Windows 2000 driver has a lot of extra overhead to cover the kernel/user mode transitions. Is it possible to use Windows 9X/ME or another interface?

Also, it may help speed up development to use the IVI driver found at ni.com/idnet. Search +ivi +"visual basic" at ni.com for detail on how to use IVI in Visual Basic.

Randy Solomonson
Application Engineer
National Instruments

[cldiller]

Greetings, Mathieu,

The 3458A is capable of taking up to 100,000 readings per second, depending upon how the instrument is configured. Setting MFORMAT and OFORMAT to the same setting so that no conversion is required will speed up the 3458A's ability to transfer data to GPIB. (Reading rates are fastest with MFORMAT/OFORMAT set to SINT or DINT.) You can also store the readings into the 3458A's memory so that you are not waiting for the measurement time of the 3458A to interfere with the transfer rate.

I hope this helps you separate the problems between the 3458A and the rest of your system.