Does VisaSTB apply for RS232 connections?

[Eric_Kulcyk]

Hello,

I am using an old Wavetek 395 device which supports RS232 programming.  I am using the only driver available for labview, which was made for GBIP.  It seems to work up untill it calls VISA STB, which it errors out on.  I am wondering if that block is even valid for RS-232 or what it should be replaced with.

Thanks,

Eric

[JD_war_eagle]

Hi Eric,

According to the Labview 2011 Help (http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371361H-01/lvinstio/visa_read_stb/) the Read STB is not valid unless the device implements a Serial-TCPIP/488 interface.  This makes sense since this VI just sends the command *STB?\n to the device.  Looking at the code, the GPIB driver uses this command to see if the device has responded to the command and then either reads data from the device or logs it as a timeout.  There are a number of modifications that you will probably have to make to these drivers in order to make them fully work with serial.  I would suggest consulting the manual for the device located here: http://crichard.web.cern.ch/crichard/pdf/pdf/Wavetek%20395%20Waveform%20Generator%20-%20User%20Manua... along with the serial read and write examples provided with Labview to determine how serial control of the device should be done.

[Eric_Kulcyk]

Yeah I already had to fix a VNA driver because we bought a prologix GPIB to serial converter, and the VNA driver was designed to work with 488.  Basicly you have to and an end of line charater to your transmission, and make sure that when you send or recieve more than 4000 bytes at a time, you read or write more than once (serial limits a message to 4k bytes).  Probably I'll end up just removing that block, and possibly adding in a wait state.

Eric