Instruments connected to bus

[BWDW]

Can I programmatically find out what instruments are connected to the bus and use the results to check for proper instrumentation for a particular test?

[Dennis_Knutson]

What bus and what programming language? If you are talking about the GPIB bus, you can use a VISA Find Resources. That's what's it's called in LabVIEW but I don't know what the function is called in other languages. You can then write the "*IDN?" string to each and look at the response.

[BWDW]

Thank you.  I will be using LabVIEW (which I am new at) and in some cases LabWindows/CVI.  Presently we are using the GPIB bus but there will probably be a mix of USB, LAN and GPIB before the project is finished.