Reading Buffer from Keithley 2400

[Plowman]

Hello,

I'm running LabVIEW 7 on WinXP and Mac OS 9.2 and I'm attempting to write a simple .vi that will cycle current or voltage source and then save the resulting voltage/current readings to a file. Making the Keithley 2400 sourcemeter cycle through source values has been fairly easy, however I don't know how to get my data from the buffer. I have searched the archives, played around with the attached K2400 library, and read through the manual and still I cannot figure out how to read the buffer and save that information to a file. Could anyone with experience point me in the right direction?

Cheers
-Plowman

[Nick_D]

Hey Plowman,

This is Nick from National Instruments, and thanks for contacting us. I'll start with the second half first. If you're able to get the information displayed on your computer, then all you would have to use is in the File I/O palette, use either the write to spreadsheet vi, or the write to text file VI.

Now to actually get this information to display on the computer, you have a few options. I was able to find a driver for it on our idnet, and you can find it here. You may be able to use this as a simple program to make sure the syntax is correct. Something else I would recommend, is if you go to Start->Program Files->National Instruments->Ni-Spy. The Ni-spy will show you the communication on the port, and you should be able to analyze the output of your commands to the instrument to analyze the commands, and see what's the instruments response to your commands. Also, if you get the driver to work, you can analyze the commands it sends vs the ones that you want to use.

Good luck with this!

Nick D.

[Plowman]

I will try that. Note that I'm using LabVIEW 7, so I'll have to check tomorrow morning whether that link you gave will work for me. Thanks.

[Plowman]

Nick,

As I suspected, those .vi files will not work with LabVIEW 7, any chance you have an earlier version of a similar thing?

[Nick_D]

Sorry Plowman,

The whole driver comes in a project explorer, and won't let me save it to a previous version earlier than 8.0. Something you may be interested in is trying the new evaluation version for labVIEW. You can find it here.

Can you let me know if that helps?

Regards,

Nick D.