Problem in communicating with Keithley 619 Electrometer/Multimeter

[SLG]

Hello All,

I am trying to communicate with Keithley 619 electrometer/multimeter using GPIB. It is a dual channel instrument with channel A and channel B. I am giving specifing the primary address of the instrument correctly. The primary address for this is 6 which corresponds to following DIP switch positions,

A1  A2  A3  A4  A5

 0    1    1    0    0

I am using the channel A which corresponds to secondary address 1.

There is another DIP switch "A6". Could you please tell me the function of that?

It will be highly helpful for me if anyone of you could please tell me how to specify the secondary address or if one could please provide me the required driver for the instrument.

Thank you.

[Albert.Geven]

Did you try to find out in MAX if the instrument is somewhere on the bus?

[SLG]

Hello Albert Geven,

Thanks for your reply.

When I was trying to see my instrument through MAX, it is saying "no instrument found"  even after specifying the primary address of the instrument.

-Shyam

[Albert.Geven]

The only thing I can think of is using another cable and making sure it does use 488

[sth]

The 619 is old...  It is not 488.2 so Max may not be able to deal with it well.  I suggest you download the manual to get a bit more familiar with the programming.  If you look at the manual you can see that the secondary address are fixed so you can't change that.

You can specify a secondary address with normal VISA  addressing, so if you are using GPIB bus 0.  To address Channel A it would be

GPIB0::6::1::INSTR and to address the status request for that channel it would be  GPIB0::6::3::INSTR.

Each command must be followed by an "X" command to actually trigger it and make it function.

Depending on the trigger mode you set with the "T" command you may need to set "unaddressing" and "readdressing" options for this device since it won't respond until separately addressed to talk.

I think there is a switch that will make the unit "Talk Only" and ingnore input commands and just spit out data continuously. This is very disruptive to a GPIB bus with a controller and mostly for the original use of going directly from measurement to printers.   Try to avoid this mode.  RTFM. (Read The Fine Manual).

[Sim5]

@Albert,

I am student i need your help can i get ur mail id related to Gpib and labview? 

[Dennis_Knutson]

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SLG wrote:

Hello Albert Geven,

Thanks for your reply.

When I was trying to see my instrument through MAX, it is saying "no instrument found"  even after specifying the primary address of the instrument.

-Shyam

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When you do a scan for instruments, there is not a way to specify the primary address so whatever you have done, it's wrong. Please explain what you did to specify an instrument address or restore the system to whatever state it was before you did this.

[SLG]

Dear Scott Hannahs,

Thank you for your valuable suggession. I will try that out.

Regards,

Shyam

[SLG]

Dear Scott Hannahs,

Greetings.

I have tried that and it works. Now I am able to see my instrument. Sould I write the programme to interface the instrument in VISA? If it is so, Could you please tell me somthing more about VISA programming?

Thanks once again.

-Shyam

[sth]

Simple use the VISA read and write icons instead of the GPIB ones.  It is a good programming practice to encapsulate your reading and writing to a single VI.

The only difference between the old traditional GPIB and VISA operations is how you specify GPIB addresses.  Instead of a single number and a bus number, you need to specify that it is GPIB as well.  That is why I gave an address of GPIB0::6::1::INSTR to use.  That would be parsed as

Use GPIB protocol and hardware

Use Bus # 0

Use Primary address 6

Use Secondary Address 1

Treat the address as an Instrument type

It is much more flexible way to communicate with instruments using different protocols.

As a programming policy do *not* have "Reads" and "Writes" scattered all over your diagram.  If the code is structured correctly there will be one VI that will "write" possibly followed by a "read" operation.  Then you can easily change the internals for this VI and add debugging info if necessary.