I am not able to communicate with Agilent frequency counter through RS232. I am using Agilent IO Libraries Suite v15. Can anyone help? Thank you.

[zzzzzzkzzz]

Hi all,

I have Agilent 53150A frequency counters. But we are facing a problem in communicating with the instrument. We have Agilent IO Libraries Suite v15 to communicate with the instrument. To connect instrument with PC we are using RJ12(instrument side) to RS232(PC side) cable. We are facing following problems.

1. Using interactive IO facility, we are able to 'connect' to ASRL1::INSTR. But after that we are not able to to much. We cannot do 'add instrument'. It gives an error as communication failure.

2. We are not able to determine the properties of the RS232 interface on the instrument side. Baud rate is configurable, but no. of bits, parity and no. of stop bits are unknown.

3. We are not able to execute even a single command through interactive IO. It always gives time out error.

Thank you.

Regards,

Jay Desai

[Albert.Geven]

Check your cabling.
And make sure that the send pin on one side ends on the receive of the other side.
This is a common mistake in rs232 (also defined as repeated soldering pin 2 -> 3-> 2)

[pBerg]

Howdy,

To follow-up with Albert's advice, the Serial Quick Reference Guide here shows the pinouts for RS-232 DB-9 connectors. If you're unsure what commands to use to test communication, Agilent has a 53150A/151A/152A Programming Guide on their site that documents them.