Is LabVIEW capable of sending commands to external frequency generators very 50 micro secs?

[bc2007]

We are hoping to use LabVIEW as the control software in a configuration where it would send commands to frequency (Agilent) generators very 50 micro secs. The commands would switch the RF on/off.

Is this very fast repitition rate possible, and if not, what would be the max rate possible? The VI would run on a 1.83Ghz laptop with a USB to GPIB converter connection to the freq generator.

We are using LabVIEW 6.0 (Full) but will upgrade to the latest.

Tks

[Ben]

Questions

1) Will your insturment respond that quickly?

2) Does the instrumnet have a gate or enable input that can be driven from analog or digital output?

3) Do you have an I/O device rated to operate that fast?

In general this will not be possible run under Windows since under the best conditions you can barely get it to do anything reliably more often than 1000 Hz.

A LV app running under RT (Real-time) may be able to do this but even then I am concerned about the speed of the GPIB.

Dennis ( if you are reading this)

Do you remember off-hand what is the transfer rate of GPIB?

Ben

Message Edited by Ben on 08-31-2007 01:20 PM

[Dennis_Knutson]

Ben,

The max transfer rate for GPIB used to be quoted as 1MB/sec. New controller cards can go higher (1.5-1.8). Older instruments will be lucky to get half this. New instruments with the NI HS488 asic can go much higher. I doubt an Agilent instrument will be using the NI ic in their instruments.

I agree that the limiting factor will not be LabVIEW. I would be surprised if the instrument could process the command and then perform the action in the required time.

[TCPlomp]

What is the purpose of this command scheme?
Do you want to have a sweep range?
In that case you can most likely prepare the instrument to react on analog triggers to go to the next frequency.
Look into the GPIB examples of your instrument and into the GPIB command set of your instrument you might find something interesting.

Ton

[Ben]

Thank you Dennis.

So to pull this off the instrument would have to have an external gate/trigger that an be driven from an analog/digitial source.

With the proper hardware, THAT can be done with LV in on a Windows machine.

Ben