Instrument driver using VISA commands does not work on Solaris with Labview 7

[Charlie H]

I have an HP33120a which uses VISA calls with my old S-Bus GPIB board. Everything worked fine with Labview 5.0, but when I upgraded to Labview 7 on the Solaris machine (everything works fine on Windows machines) I cannot get the instrument to respond. It is behaving like there is no connection to the VISA code, but I have installed version 2.6 in the recommended directory. Is there any way to check the VISA installation? I have very little room left on /opt so I was trying to do a minimal install, and maybe a connection did not get made

[Brian_Powell]

One way to narrow this down would be to test GPIB independently of VISA.

You can try running "ibic" (usually in /usr/bin or /usr/gpib, maybe). This gives you a command-line interface to send NI-488.2 commands.

In ibic, you could try something like "ibfind gpib0" and then "ibfind dev10" (or whatever GPIB address you are using for an instrument). If you've gotten this far without an error, your GPIB driver is probably okay. (To be sure, you could 'ibwrt "*IDN?"' and "ibrd 500" to query the instrument.)

Next, you could try the VISA utilities for Solaris. These are installed by default in /opt/vxipnp/sun/NIvisa. Try running "NIvisaic", which is an X Windows application to let you see devices and send commands.

Note that if you haven't installed VISA
in /opt/vxipnp, you need to set the VXIPNPPATH environment variable for LabVIEW to be able to find it.

This will help you narrow it down to see whether it's a NI-488.2 problem, a VISA problem, or a LabVIEW problem. Report back here with your results. I hope this helps.