Is the VME-GPIB device supported in Labview?

[iamzen]

Does Labvie provide vi's which could be used to directly control GPIB devices connected to the VME-GPIB board?

[JohnM 64]

Hi iamzen,

The VME-GPIB bus is certainly supported in LabVIEW, in that you can definitely use it to communicate with the device. However, there are no VIs that handle all of the VME bus and GPIB bus communication for us... you will need to program the device just like any other VME device. Good luck with your application!

john m
Applications Engineer

[iamzen]

Thank you John M 64.
OK, so how do I procede? I wonder if you could outline what steps I would need to take to implement a simple LabView application which uses the VME-GPIB board. In fact the application could get very complicated depending on how complex the programming of the VME-GPIB might turn out to be.
This is my hardware setup: a VME crate is interfaced to a Windows XP PC via PCI-MXI2 extender. VME-GPIB is in the VME crate. Lets say that I attach some simple GPIB instrument to the VME-GPIB board, I know its capabilities. What do I need to do first before I can issue a simple GPIB command like IDN? to my instrument?
I purchased with the VME-GPIB board the NI488DDK software development kit. It seems to me that the DDK software is not very usefull for what I have in mind, which is to use the VME-GPIB board with LabView. Do I need some other documentation for the VME-GIB device to be able to procede?
Thanks in advance,
Zen