Instrument I/O -- VISA vs GPIB 488

[Donkey Rubarb]

Hello,

i find the GPIB write, read ... vi's more easy
to use in comparison with the visa write, read ...vi's, therefore I use them where_ever possible.
But now I need to lock an interface,in Visa you
have the Visa Lock & Unlock Vi's for this,
but how can you do this with the GPIB 422 vi's???
And what about the Visa close vi..?

Bye for now...
F_D

[Ray.R]

Hi FD,

I haven't seen a "locking" feature within the GPIB vi's. However, you can send a command to put the instrument into remote or local mode. You can also create something like a semaphore where you only allow a single access to the instrument (that is you define one key which must be released before more access is allowed).

Closing the "GPIB" is typically done by closing the session to the instrument. In comparison, "opening the instrument" is really initializing it.

Think in terms of the instruments and it's available commands rather than GPIB as a port.

Hope this helps,

JLV

[Donkey Rubarb]

Hi Joe,

the semaphore thing sounds interesting, what is
the vi called like?
Still I want to lock an interface rather than an
instrument, so seems like I should change all
the 488.2vi's and replace them with the Visa one's
..Uggh

Bye

[JorisV]

Hi F_D,

Indeed, there are no locking VI's included with the GPIB driver.Users either have to use VISA or they must make direct entry calls to the GPIB-32.dll but that's not really good programming. We have recieved the suggestion before from other customers about including this functionality in our GPIB driver and R&D will consider this option.

Regards.

Joris Vanderschrick
Team Leader Applications Engineering
NIBE