Using Instrument I/O to send BINARY commands

[Andy Richman]

Hi,

Is it possible to send Binary commands using the instrument I/O assistant?

I'm using Zaber TLA actuators to position an XY table.

The TLAs only accept binary commands not ASCII.

I cannot find a way of sending binary commands (Only the parser for reading the results sent back)

Any help would be gratefully recieved.

[SachaE]

Hi Andy,

  GPIB and serial only understand ascii characters. By that I mean characters between 0 and 255 as an integer.

Technically, if you can work out what the values you want to send are, then you can hold down the Alt key, and on the numeric keypad type in the number

as in Alt + 0065 would give a capital A. This might not work for some of your values, especially if you need non-printable characters like a "10" which is the line feed.

I would recommend programming this normally through VISA vi's rather than the I/O assistant whereby you can take an array of U8's and convert them to a string directly to send.

Hope that helps

Sacha Emery

National Instruments (UK)