02-06-2013 10:00 PM
Does anyone know where I can find a Wayne Kerr 7720 Impulse Tester LabVIEW driver. The tester has a RS232 interface. Also helpful would be a good source for learning how to write such a serial driver in the event that I can't find one.
Thank you.
02-07-2013 11:39 AM
The two places to look for drivers are the manufacturer and the NI Instrument Driver pages. On the Wayne Kerr web site there are links to drivers for a few instruments which are very old - LV5. NI also has a few drivers. All are for GPIB instruments and a links to the Wayne Kerr page.
It looks like you will be writing your own or hiring someone to do it for you.
Before starting to write a driver, you should become familiar with manually operating the instrument. Many of the questions posted about drivers turn out to be limitations of the instrument, not the driver. For example if it takes 100 ms for the instrument to respond to a range change command, making the driver faster than that will not speed up anything and may produce errors. Next you need to have the command or porgramming manual for the instrument. Then you need to decide whether you will be writing complete driver which will do everything the instrument can do or a simplified driver which can meet your current requirements but may require a rewrite to add features.
Instruments vary widely and, especially, communication via RS-232 is completely non-standardized. This makes it impractical to try to give an specific guidance on developing a driver.
Lynn