53310

[Ray.R]

---

Kaspar wrote:

When the programmers manual arrives I will go to the local drugstore for a bottle of murine and see if I can find what command(s) are needed to obtain a screenshot.

---

😮 😮

LOL!!  You should have seen my face the first time I read that sentence..!!  LOL!  😄 

[Kaspar]

Hello,

   Thanks for the info, I will look at it. When I talked to the agilent tech rep last week he told me that the programmers manual is not available and suggested several test equipment shops that sell the programmers manual. Stay tuned...

Regards,

Kaspar

[Ray.R]

Did you look at the link that smercurio provided?  The manual should be online as a pdf.

R

[Kaspar]

Hello,

   I have spent some time looking at the 201 page operators manual that someone appears to have manually scaned into a PDF file, so it is not a searchable document. So I decided to look at the table of contents to see if there was something obvious that might help me understand how to get a screenshot. I looked at page 26 (chap 1 section 10) and page 146 in the utility chapter. I also called Agilent tech support and the firmware inside the instrument is intended to wirite the screen data only to a specific set of printers.  So if I want to be able to get the screenshot I would have to have some code that would make the instrument think that a printer was connected to the GPIB port, a simple VISA read would not do it. Also, page 26 says that  when you connect a printer to the GPIB port that any other controller needs to be disconnected from the HP-IB bus.

  Here are some other things to consider about the HP53310A, they are:

• The HP53310A is a discontinued instrument
• Agilent no longer sells the HP53310A
• Agilent tech support ends on May 1st 2009
• Documentation for this instrument is difficult to obtain

  So based upon the items above, I will sit down with my co-workers and discuss what the options are for the HP53310A. Hopefully common sense and/or divine wisdom will prevail that will result in getting funding to obtain a new instrument.  Hopefully, the "powers to be" will make their mind up which way we should go. 

Regards,

Kaspar   

[smercurio_fc]

Well, good luck with that. I can tell you that I've had to deal with a lot of antiquated instruments around here.

You should still consider the alternative of getting the data into a LabVIEW graph and printing that. You can always add additional information onto the graph using annotations. More programming work for you, though.

[Ray.R]

That brings back memories... 😉

Just a simple question... Are you able to get a screen shot and manually transfer it over GPIB or Ethernet (if it suuported Ethernet) or even over RS232.

Does that vintage of instrument have a hard drive?  If no hard drive, your options are probably just 1 => get the data, plot it in Labview and save that image.

R

[Kaspar]

Hello,

   Funding to buy new test equipment has not yet been released so unfortunately I have to use the HP53310A, and here is the vi I wrote to obtain the raw data from the HP53310A and make a XY graph. There are 2 vis, that you will need to use this, which are attached to this posting. If you have any questions, please feel reply to this posting.