Problem configuring instrument

[Steve_N]

I'm totally new to LabVIEW and would really appreciate some help.

Here's what I have:
LabVIEW 6.1 Full Development System.
NI PCI GPIB card.
Keithley 2700 Multimeter.

I've installed the Keithley 2700 drivers.
With MAX it appears under "Devices and Interfaces" okay.
"Communicate with Instrument" works perfectly.  No problem talking to
it so far.

Problem is, I think I'm next supposed to go to Data Neighborhood
create a new Virtual Channel.  When I get to "What DAQ hardware will
be used?" no hardware appears, so I can't select anything.

What did I miss?

Thanks,
Steve

[Matt_S.]

Hi Steve,

You don't need to create a virtual channel to talk to the Keithley MM. That's only for Data Acquisition type applications. You are simply doing instrument communication. Since you can successfully communicate with that instrument in MAX there's no more configuration you need to do in MAX for this to work in LabVIEW.

Your next step is to just set up communication with that instrument through LabVIEW. There is an example to do this for you in LabVIEW 6.1

Open the example finder (Help->Find Examples), then navigate through the following folders.

Hardware Input and Output
GPIB

In this folder you will find a VI called LabVIEW <-> GPIB .vi.

This should allow you to do your communication with the instrument in LabVIEW. If you don't want to just do lower level communication you can also check out the following page to download an instrument driver for that device that works in LabVIEW 6.1 (get the LabVIEW 6.0 driver). Using instrument drivers allows you another layer of abstraction from the lower level I/O functions.
Keithley 2700 Instrument Driver Page
Good Luck!
Matt S.