Agilent E440x Spectrum Analyzer screen capture?

[jm-sc]

Does anyone have a LabView VI to do a screen capture of an Agilent E440x Spectrum Analyzer.  I would like to capture a .gif or .jpg of the exact SA screen image.  I did not see a command in Agilent's manual to do this directly - I can save to the SA hard drive but want to save to the PC.

[Dennis_Knutson]

If the screen capture command writes only to a local file, see if there is a command for file transfer. If you have the IntuiLink software from Agilent, the documentation for it says that you can do a screen capture. You can turn on NI-Spy while the command runs and look to see what happens. It's possible that there is an undocumented command to do what you want. The other possibility is that the IntuiLink screen capture is not actually transfering a screen capture from the instrument to the pc. It just might be doing a screen capture of the IntuiLink display. Presumably, you have a have front panel that is displaying trace data. It's simple (and much faster) to take a screen capture of that.

[jm-sc]

Thanks Dennis, the spy capture of the message was the trick I needed to see how they transferred the .wmf file in Intuilink.

The other detail I found on the discussion board- is to save the file and have it read by anything that can open a .wmf the block header needs to be stripped off the file before saving as a .wmf.

"I need to do a screen capture of an Agilent spectrum analyzer (Model 4408B) and this SA will output an image in JPEG in 488.2 Definite Length Block format. This means the JPEG file will have a header that starts with a "#", is followed by a single digit that gives the length of a following count field, and then the count field, which gives the length of data being sent. For example, to send a block of 1024 bytes, the header would have the form "#41024"."
...so read the second character 4 in this case to find out how many characters to strip off, in this case 6.

[Dennis_Knutson]

For anyone else that might need to do this in the future, what was the command you found to do the transfer? Was this a command that you eventually found in the manual or a trick that Agilent tied to keep to themselves?

[jm-sc]

Used VISA write to send the following- these are included in manual, but not very clear on writing to mem rather than SA disk.

:MMEM:DEL "R:IM1.WMF"
:MMEM:CAT? "R:"

:MMEM:STOR:SCR "R:IM1.WMF"
:MMEM:DATA? "R:IM1.WMF"

and then VISA read to get the data - used a byte count larger than required and it worked- did not have any luck wiring the byte count output of the VISA write to the VISA read byte count input.

stripped off the header and saved to a file.

[Ray.R]

Hi jm,

When you used the VISA Read, did it transfer the image to the PC?

Can you provide more detials about this statement: " ...a byte count larger than required... ";  how much larger?  The byte count should be the size of the image, right?

Thanks,

JLV

[Dennis_Knutson]

Wiring the Byte Count output of VISA Write to the Byte Count input of VISA Read is not supposed to work. The output is the number of bytes that were actually written. It would be a very rare occurence for the length of the command string to be equal to the number of bytes the instrument will send. You can usually specify some arbitrary high number of bytes to read because with a 488.2 compliant instrument, at the end of the data being sent, the instrument will assert EOI and VISA Read will terminate.

[Ray.R]

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@jm-sc wrote:

 did not have any luck wiring the byte count output of the VISA write to the VISA read byte count input.

---

Thanks Dennis,

I think old age is catching up to me!!  😞   I missed that part of the sentence earlier... 😮  sorry about the confusion.  I agree that wiring the output of the VISA Write to input of VISA read would not worked.. 

My interest with this thread is the fact that we were unsuccessful (~2001) to achieve this.  I'm curious in a solution that works.  From what I recall, it was possible to control the instrument to get a screen capture, but was not possible to transfer it over GPIB.

It's always good to learn new tricks. 

JLV

[lmontoya]

Did you found any solution to transfer screen to PC using GPIB bus in LabView?

Thank you

[Sim5]

Hello All,

I am also doing same programming of capturing the screen-shot... But facing error at VISA read always. Please if anyone guide me or just post the program. So it will be very helpful to me. I am attaching my code. I am trying so much with gpib read, receive but nothing is working out... So i will be very thankful and glad if anyone can help me with this.

Thanks so much...

Pals