agilent 8453 chemstation can not communicate with NI-GPIB

[esaban]

I have agilent 8453 with HP-IB interface (ISA slot, really old). the computer is really old so we needed another computer but recent motherboards don't have ISA slot, and I had to buy new interface. recently I got NI-GPIB to contol agilent 8453 via chemstation. but chemstation can not communicate with the instrument. I tried to set device address to 25 as old computer but no success. any idea how can I make them talk?

[Albert.Geven]

Please clarify what you have

an agilent 8453 instrument with a gpib connection, and chemstation software on a pc with ......

I don't hope you still have an ISA card in the pc, but what do you have is misty to me.

[esaban]

old commputer:

HP-IB interface (ISA slot)

new computer:

NI-GPIB (PCI interface)

instrument works totally fine with old computer but it is old, so I bought a new computer and a NI-GPIB card. 

so the software (chemstation) was able talk to instrument via HP-IB card but in new computer the same software was not able to talk to instrument via NI-GPIB card. what I need to do is to tell my software to see that card maybe but how?

[Dennis_Knutson]

Unless the software uses VISA to communicate with the instrument, you will never get it to work with an NI card. The low level drivers of an NI and Agilent (HP) card are not at all compatible. You would need to modify the chemstation software. I have no idea how old this chemstation software is but you really need to check with Agilent/HP.

[Albert.Geven]

Agilent is still selling hardware and software that has the same names.

[esaban]

Agilent has HP-IB with PCI interface but it's expensive. same interface from NI (NI-GPIB) should be able to talk. if this is not the case I'm going to need to sell that NI-GPIB card, because it's going to be useless at this point.

[Dennis_Knutson]

All GPIB cards from all vendors provide the same protocol for controlling instruments. The protoclo is defined by IEEE-488.2. What you don't seem to understand is that each card will have a different windows driver. This is no different than video cards from different vendors. The commands in your program are almost certainly specific to an Agilent card and not the more portable VISA api. A quick check with Agilent or this board would have told you that before you bought the card from NI. The only way you could use the NI card is by modifying the program.

[FTG]

This is way late, but FTG Software offers a solution for Agilent 8453 using NI GP-IB board. Too bad you didn't find us! We'll have to add some key words to Google Adwords.

See http://ftgsoftware.com/sqindex.htm

Fred

[FTG]

In the latest revision of Scantraq, the 8453 works fine with serial (USB) interface as well as LAN and NI-GPIB.

Frankly, there is no advantage to GPIB unless multiple instruments are being controlled. Please visit

    http://ftgsoftware.com/sqindex.htm