ESP300 controller is having communication error

[thegodfather]

Hi,

We are using ESP300 Controller with ILS250 stage. It was working fine till last week. Suddenly it has stopped responding to

the Labview 7.0 commands. We checked everything, and finally using GPIB basic commands troubleshooter, we see that

the device is not responding to even *IDN? command itself. The cable, GPIB-USB-HS etc are all fine. No port/address conflict

also. NO new Instrument is added or removed in the setup. The controller is tested standalone. Still same problem.

We are able to communicate with other Instruments using the same cable and setup.

The controller beeps when we send ANY kind of command or try to communicate with it. The error displayed on its front panel

is "COMMAND NOT FOUND".

We are able to manually move the stage using the keys on the front panel board of ESP300. Only communication with PC is the

problem and has developed sudddenly 2 days back. Please help/suggest any remedies. thanks.  

[ceties]

Are you sending the carriage return constant after each command?

[ceties]

One more thing which is not probably related to your problem but which ESP 300 GPIB library are you using? If the one from Newport website you should also read probably this thread. When I used it I was facing the same timeout troubles which were solved by the modified library.

Cheers

[thegodfather]

Hi

thanks for the message. Yes. We are sending the CR. GPIB Library we are using may be older version. We have LV7.0

so new one may not work immediately. But the problem I have described does not look like related to this. Otherwise it

would have popped up before. It was working fine, we were collecting data fine till 2 days ago. Please suggest some other ideas

if possible.

thanks.

[ceties]

Hi,

my only advice is to connect the device over RS232 instead of GPIB and try if it responds. Set up the communication as depicted in the attached picture. If it won't respond than the problem is elsewhere than in the software. Be sure that you send the command in the right format ended by "\r"