Hello.
Thank you for posting to the NI Discussion Forums.
When attempting to communicate with an instrument, there are a few things that we can try in LabVIEW. First, National Instruments offers a wide array of Instrument Drivers that consist of a set of VI's that make communicating with your instrument very simple. These drivers can be found at
www.ni.com/idnet and are freely downloadable. However, I was not able to find a driver for the Adamel product that you described.
The next thing to do is to use lower level VI's to communicate with your instrument. The first thing that we need to establish is how the instrument is hooked up to your PC. Is it communicating via a serial port? Ethernet? GPIB? If you are using GPIB, NI offers a 488.2 driver that will help you communicate with the instrument. If using a serial port, you can use our NI-Serial driver. However, for both of these interfaces, you can also use NI-VISA. NI-VISA is a great driver that allows us to standardize communication with many instruments over many different interfaces. I would explore this route first and foremost. There are great resources at the following websites that will get you started with VISA:
NI-VISA Overview After finding this out, we can then focus on the correct commands to send your instrument to perform a desired operation. For example, if your instrument is SCPI compliant, a command such as *IDN? will return a string that identifies the instrument being communicated to. I would start with developing this program as an equivalent to the "Hello World" program in text based programming languages.
Let us know if this helps!
Brian F
Applications Engineer
National Instruments
