NI-VISA does not see a GPIB device (Weinschel 8200 Controller)

[David_Hary]

I am trying to use NI-VISA with this controller but NI-VISA does not seem to 'see' this GPIB device. 

I am able to talk to it over GPIB but not under visa.

Does anyone know what could cause VISA not to communicate with a device that works with strieght GPIB?  What should I look for in the specs.  For example, must the device support parralel polling?

I am using NI-VISA 3.5 with a CEC USB-488 board. 

I can see and talk to other devices with this same configuration.

Thanks

David

[cymrieg]

Did you enable the CEC passport and disable the NI-488 passport? They are both wanting to claim "GPIB0" by default.

[David_Hary]

I thought that since the board works with other instruments I am ok.  I attached the list of passports.  Which ones should I disable and enable?

Thanks

David

[cymrieg]

I would disable the NiVi488 and the KeViInes and leave the KeViCec enabled. There is another way to fix this if you have to use both a Ni card and a CEC card on the same PC, but more complicated. Enabling/disabling passports is the easiest and quickest thing to do to see if this is the problem.

[David_Hary]

I did check off the passports for NI and INES.  Still, the device does not appear in the VISA list. 

Note that it goes into remote and I open the VISA interface control.   I can see the interface GPIB0::INTFC

Any ideas where to go from here?

Thanks

[cymrieg]

Oooh I get it now  I just re-read your first and last posts. So the Visa interactive works for other instruments but no this one. I can find anything about a "Weinschel 8200 Controller" ie. the manual.

Does this instrument support *idn? (ie. scpi)?

I clicked the box to get emails when some else responds to this but it doesn't seem to be working.

[David_Hary]

The controller is not a SCPI instrument. It does CLS, RST, OPC, SRE? but not IDN? or *IDN? (no * commands). 

I can see it addressed when VISA scans the instruments - it goes Remote.

Does VISA require SCPI?  I can talk to HP8753 Network Analyzer, which is definitely not SCPI but supports IDN? (not *IDN? though).

[Dennis_Knutson]

VISA does not require SCPI. You can't get any of the commands to work with the instrument? Since this is an older instrument, you might want to check the way the GPIB write is supposed to be terminated. Newer instruments just require EOI but older ones might require a CR, LF, or both. Also, if the GPIB functions are working, is there a reason you don't want to use them instead of VISA?

[David_Hary]

I can talk to instrument using GPIB.  But I cannot establish a VISA session - NI-VISA does not seem 'see' the instrument.

The instrument seems to support EOI: "A line terminator takes the form of an ASCII Line-Feed character (OAH), or an EOI signal asserted with the last data byte, or both."

I prefer VISA because it is driver independent.

[Dennis_Knutson]

Let me try to understand. Is the instrument found in MAX? If it fails to respond to the *IDN? query, that's fine. What's important is that MAX find it. This does not involve VISA. If it's found, in your program, does it fail on a VISA Open or something else? If it fails on sending a command, try appending the LF character at the end of the command.