NI vs Agilent GPIB cards

[Philip Frampton]

Following on from a previous post...

I have a LabView program written to make use of the
VISA facility. The machine it runs on has a NI PCI TNT
card. I need to run the program on an additional machine
and have to purchase another GPIB card. I have ruled out
the non VISA cards because of the time it will take me to
learn and then modify in LabView.

I understand that both Agilent and NI make PCI-GPIB cards
that support VISA. The Agilent is much cheaper (here in
the UK), has anyone had any experience in swapping NI for
Agilent, specifically any re-coding required.

Thank you

--
Philip Frampton
Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, Oxford University, Oxford.
e-mail:philip.frampton@chem.ox.ac.uk

[LesHammer]

I haven't tried this in LabVIEW, but several years ago I developed some VXI Plug&Play
drivers. We specifically tested them to make sure that they would work with both
Agilent and NI GPIB cards. As long as you have used VISA, most things should be OK.

To minimize problems, make sure that both cards have the same VISA name (such as GPIB0).
Sometimes NI and Agilent handled formatted I/O differently. (The case I
vaguely rememeber, Agilent allowed the format to be generated in the same line
of code that did the read/write. NI required that the format be generated first
and then be used in the read/write. But barring tricky things like that you should be OK.

Les.Hammer@CompleteTest.com