Need Studio accessible driver for Agilent 34980A

[Roy J]

Need an Labwindows driver for agilent 34980A Multifunction Switch / Measure unit.

/Roy

[thehobbs]

NI does not currently provide a LabWindows/CVI driver for the Agilent 34980a. I believe that there are only some minor differences in the commands sets for the 34980a and the 34970a. Therefore, I recommend that you try the Agilent 34970a VXIpnp driver and modify it as needed. It is available here:
http://adn.tm.agilent.com/index.cgi?CONTENT_ID=23&SESSION_ID=542-1112975572-6985211

[gagi1]

I believe Agilent provides IVI-C instrument driver for this instrument. You should take a look at this URL:

http://adn.tm.agilent.com/index.cgi?CONTENT_ID=1382&SESSION_ID=905-1112976554-6986521

Regards,
Vesna

[EWTech]

This instrument can connect with GPIB. I'd like to control the device through the LAN. Does measurement studio provide access to the device though the lan interface at all? Agilent wants us to use their stuff to operate this machine but we have lots of LabVIEW stuff we do not want to throw away. Bringing up LabVIEW for simple smaller applications seems like a waste in light of the overhead of LabVIEW and we would prefer NOT to run LabVIEW on the server under any circumstances. The command set may be similar as far as it goes but the scpi commands only work through the GPIB interface as far as I can tell. The Agilent driver does not seem to work with the NI drivers in side-by-side installations.

Message Edited by EWTech on 05-01-2007 01:44 PM

Message Edited by EWTech on 05-01-2007 01:45 PM

[Adam W]

Hi,

If you can get your device recognized by VISA and MAX, then you should be able to make VISA calls in C code.  This knowledgebase and tutorial have more information on setting up a TCP/IP resource in MAX.  You can reference the NI-VISA help for specific information on VISA functions.  As far as commands go, you can use VISA Read and Write in LabVIEW similar to using GPIB Read and Write.  If the instrument responds to certain commands, VISA should be able to work with them (though your termination may be different).

Hope this helps!

Adam W
Applications Engineering
National Instruments

[EWTech]

Thanks for the reply. I actually ended up using the IVI-COM driver under C#. This works really well for us as the driver and capabilities under .NET was greatly enhanced with the recent release of an updated driver by Agilent. We really had to use range and mantissa length parameters to get any sort of performance out of the machine but once that was sorted things moved fairly quickly. There is a great deal of variance in integration time for these machines depending on how the measurement scan configuration is done with differences of as much as 100% time differences per channel of measurement. The current IVI-COM driver allows for the entire range of capability of the machine now and not some partially useful subset of the native SCPI command set. I used the Agilent IO libraries for what I did but I think you can get the same functions using the VISA functions provided by NI as long as MAX is able to recognize and connect to the machine.