ASCII Strings from HP 53131A Universal Counter

[videoman]

I'm using LabWindows/CVI 4.01. I'm trying to read the frequency back from a HP 53131A Counter. What I get is a ASCII string which looks like this: v~}}}}}vt|uU ttv^h, which should be 2,999,996.078 Hz as shown on the counters display. How do I get this into a more readable and useable format. I want to display the frequency in my application.

[JuanCarlos]

Videoman,

Each instrument that you communicate to has an specific "protocol" for communication. Most return actual string, but other return binary data that you have to read in a specific data type.

The first thing that here is to make sure that you are using the CVI Instrument Driver for the HP 53131A this will make things much easier and you may not need to worry about string conversions. You can find this driver here.

Take a look at the documentation for the instrument or the driver to find out what is the data type that the instrument returns; based on that data type you can do the right casting to read the bytes in the right for
mat.

Let me know how this goes.

Good Luck

Juan Carlos
N.I.


Message Edited by Support on 04-03-2008 02:30 PM