NI PCI Board Can't Identify Proper Address

[jbm160]

Hi,

I recently traded in an 'obsolete' ISA GPIB card to get a PCI GPIB card.  This was installed in our computer, which has a Windows XP platform, and the installation seemed to work fine.  We have two electrochemical instruments we wish to interface with the card: a Solartron 1250 frequency response analyzer and a PAR 273 potentiostat/galvanostat.   We used the hardware scanning feature to try to find these two instruments, but failed to find the Solartron 1250 at all, and found the wrong GPIB address for the PAR 273.  I determined this by connecting only one instrument at a time to the NI card.  The GPIB address is set to 6 on the PAR 273 but the software keeps returning an address of 2.  I turned the 273 on and off several times, and even reset the address, but the scan keeps telling me that address is 2.  As for the Solartron 1250, it would not even identify that it was connected.  I tried switching the GPIB cables around and this did nothing to change the situation. 

I went to the hardware profile in Windows XP and looked at the GPIB card.  There was no yellow exclamation point next to the card in the list, which seems to indicate that the computer has no problems communicating with the card.  Also, when I clicked on the card, it indicated that there are no problems with the card.  So it seems that the problem is between the card and our instruments. 

Thanks in advance for any help!

Jason McLafferty

[Emilie S.]

Hi Jason:

First to address the instrument that does not show up at all when you scan for instruments.  I'm assuming since you used this instrument with your ISA board that it could be pretty old.  Sometimes the scan for instruments will not work with these older instruments, however you can still communicate with them using GPIB commands.  One way to check this is through the interactive control.  This can be done by right clicking on your GPIB board in MAX then selecting Interactive Control.  Attached to this e-mail is a screen shot of what interactive control should look like.  The only difference you will want is possibly a different command in the event your instrument does not respond to *IDN?.

As for the instrument that is not coming up with the proper address.  Unfortunately I do not know why this is happening, or how to fix it.  With this since scan for instruments does find the instrument you should try to open a VISA session to it.  Right click on the instrument and select Open VISA Session.  VISAIC will open and you should select the Basic I/O tab.  Execute a write then execute a read.  If you write *IDN? and get the instrument description when you read, then we have verified that we can communicate with the instrument.  If this does not work I would recommend that you try interactive control as you did for the previous instrument.

Regards,

Emilie S.

Message Edited by Emilie S. on 07-08-2005 03:51 PM