Remote Programming Issues

[ELItheICEman]

Hi all,

I have a Chroma 63803 electronic AC load that I am trying to control through LabVIEW.  I have a set of drivers pre-written for a California Insturments AC load and the commands for the Chroma are very similar, so I created a new set of drivers for the Chroma, but they aren't working.  I looked through the user's manual and made ensured the commands that I was sending were correct, and it seems like they are to me.  The "Remote" light comes turns on on the front of the display for the Chroma, but the commands aren't doing anything.  Is there something simple that I'm missing, some kind of initialization at startup that needs to be done?

Thanks in advance.

[mikeporter]

Have you verified that the strings being transmitted are what you are expecting? Is the instrument looking for any sort of terminator at the end of the command? What sort of errors is the instrument returning? You are checking for errors right?

Something that can be helpful is to try a basic command like *IDN? to see if the device will identify itself and you can read the response.

Mike...

[ELItheICEman]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your reply.  I added a semicolon and a line feed constant terminator and now it seems to be working.  The California Instruments AC load didn't require them, maybe the instrument recognized the end of a command and added it in itself, I'm not sure.  Manually adding these new terminators seems to have fixed the problem though.  Thanks!