VISA Assistant can not find the instrument.

[Jiwei]

I tried to control Agilent 34970A through RS232,
but the VISA Assistant can not find the instrument,
and there is no respond when I send a command to
the instrument. I am sure that the instrument is
good, and is set to RS232 interface, the cable is
right(verified), and the parameter such as baud
rate is the same as the computer.
(I am using LabVIEW 6.1)


Can anyone give me an explain about my problem?
Thank you very much!

[Dennis_Knutson]

What VISA Assistant are you talking about? MAX is able to locate GPIB instruments and serial ports but I'm not aware of anything that will find instruments on a serial port. When you use the instrument driver, your VISA resource name should be ASRL1::INSTR or you can use the Com1 alias (assuming you're using the first serial port on the PC). Are you, in fact, using the insturment driver?

[Dan_Mondrik]

For communicating with Serial instruments, I recommend using NI-VISA, which comes with LabVIEW. The interactive tool that ships with NI-VISA is called "VISA Interactive Control" and is sometimes referred to as VISAIC.

"VISA Assistant" is the name of a utility that ships with Agilent VISA. I am not sure if it can work with NI-VISA.

Dan Mondrik
National Instruments

[LesHammer]

> "VISA Assistant" is the name of a utility that ships with Agilent VISA. I am not sure if it can work with NI-VISA.

Agilent VISA does work with NI-VISA -- provided everything is installed correctly. A user may wish to use both Agilent VISA and NI-VISA together if they have a mix of IO cards. If NI-VISA is present, then Agilent VISA should be installed in the side-by-side mode, and NI-MAX should set the Passport to On. Then LabVIEW will see all the Agilent cards, and Agilent VISA Assistant will see all the NI-Cards. (The last time I tried this though, NI-MAX didn't see the Agilent cards.)

What was not mentioned in the original question is what VISA configuration is being used. If more specifics are provided a more specific answer can be given.


Les.Hammer@CompleteTest.com