How to set up communication between my laptop and Agilent 8164A?And how to write the source code?

[Lance49]

Hi, I am required to use LabView 8.0 to create a VI file to control my Agilent 8164A Lightwave Measurement Instrument. Does anyone knows how to go about doing this?

[Dennis_Knutson]

You can get a driver for it here and you also need the low level dll from Agilent that the above site also references. The driver uses GPIB so you would also need a controller. For a laptop, the GPIB-USB would work great.

[Lance49]

Hi, thanks for the suggestion. However, I still have another problem. How should the source code for the control be written? Is there any similiar examples for me to refer to?

[Dennis_Knutson]

If the driver had been written by NI, you would have an example VI in the driver that shows a way to use some of the instrument functions. I don't think this driver has such an example. You can look at https://www.ni.com/en/support/downloads/instrument-drivers.html and under the Learn topic are some links on what a driver is, how  to use one, etc. Ultimately, how you write the source code will depend on what you want the program to do. Study the functions in the driver and experiment with them and see what each one does. If you know how to manually setup the instrument to perform a test, then determine which functions you need to call to replicate that.

[jjp377]

Hi,

You can use the templates to we have on IDNet or you can also download other drivers for ex: Agilent 34401 to get an idea.

For the specific commands for the 8164 model you might want to check the manual for the instrument on Agilent's site

[Lance49]

Ok. Thanks a lot. I will try to study the 8164A Lightwave in greater details.

🙂

[Lance49]

Hi, I have already installed the driver for the 8164A Lightwave Measurement System. However, when I tried to open the examples, it shows missing Sub VIs. This is true for all my examples after I have installed the driver. The version of LabView that I am using is ver.8.0. May I know what is the possible cause of this? How should I solve it? This is quite important to me as I would need the examples to understand how to control my 8164A using LabView. Thanks

[BerkO]

Did you install the driver to the correct location?

It needs to be installed in the instr.lib folder under Labview.

[Lance49]

Yes, I have installed the driver in the instr.lib folder. It seems that all the sub VIs are missing. Is there anyway I could get the sub VIs or get new examples for 8164a?

[NathanT]

Hello Lance,
        I just downloaded the driver and extracted it to my LabVIEW inst.lib, the VI Tree has all of the SubVIs.  The whole filepath is:
C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 8.5\instr.lib\hp816x

which is where you should be able to find hp816x.llb and some menu files

I recommend that you confirm that your filepath does not have a folder named hp816x in it twice, which can sometimes happen by accident.

Cheers,

NathanT