No IVI Soft Front Panel Function

[matfrost]

Just after submitting the last post i have got a reply from Keithley. They say :-



At present, the IVI/VISA-based Driver for the Keithley 2000 DMM from National Instruments will not support a Keithley 2001 DMM. Unfortunately, the only option I can recommend is that you use the Standard Commands for Programmable Instrumentation (i.e. SCPI) to control your instrument.
There is a Software Driver for the 2001 DMM available on our website, www.keithley.com, which utilizes the SCPI protocol in LabVIEW. The user manual also details several SCPI example programs. This can also be downloaded from our website.




So where do I stand now? Can I control this instrument from Measurement Studio, or do I need to use SCPI from Labview? (Which I don't have)

Any suggestions, or can anyone translate what this means in basic terms?

Regards

Matthew

[Glenn Burnside]

It sounds like at this point, there is not a valid instrument driver for your particular DMM that you could use in .NET code. Another option would be to use the Measurement Studio VisaNS .NET API to send and receive messages from the device. Using this approach assumes that you have some knowledge of the command set the instrument will accept. You should be able to find information about those commands in the device's user manual. To get started with sending and receiving data from the device using VISA, I suggest using the Instrument I/O Assistant from inside Visual Studio. You can find information on how to use the IIOA in the "Creating a Measurement Studio 488.2 or VISA Application" topic in the Measurement Studio help.

Another approach would be to modify and recompile the source code for the Keithley 2000 IVI driver to use the correct commands for the 2001 and use that dll through the Instrument Driver Wizard-generated wrapper.

Also, I believe you got a compiled Dll from Vesna Jadric for the existing legacy driver for the Keithley 2001 DMM - were you not able to use that Dll with the wrapper that was generated from the instrument driver wizard?

[matfrost]

I have tried using the dll for the 2001, but get the following error at the top 'TODO: Could not resolve any constant values; Discarding all constants.
I then don't have much luck using it.

I only have the standard version of Measurement studio so don't have the Visa wizard

Cheers

Matthew

[Glenn Burnside]

Matthew,
I looked at the code for the 2001 before Vesna sent you the dll. You're getting that TODO: item at the top of the generated code because there are no #defined constants in that driver - which is why it can't resolve any. Since you haven't had much luck using the generated wrapper, can you tell me what you've tried and what results you got? Or, if you'd rather proceed with doing IO through VISA, I'd suggest looking at the user's manual and the C driver's code to determine what commands you want to send to the device and working with the Instrument IO Assistant, as I outlined in my previous post.

[Glenn Burnside]

Matthew,
Sorry, I just re-read your last post and realized you don't have the Instrument IO Assistant. However, you should still be able to directly use the VisaNS .NET API to send and receive messages from the device, if you want to go that route.

[matfrost]

are there any examples of how to use VisaNs to send SCPI commands?

[Glenn Burnside]

We don't necessarily have an example that explicitly demonstrates sending SCPI messages. However, SCPI message are ultimately just strings - and the messages you want to send are up to you. We have numerous examples of using the VisaNS API in the Examples directory, C:\program files\National Instruments\MeasurementStudioVS2003\DotNET\Examples\Visa which demonstrate various operations like Reading, Writing, asynchronous IO, handling device requests, etc.