DL3021A Drivers

[MohamadOfNazareth]

Hello everyone,

Apologies if this isn't the right place to ask but I'm trying to set up a DC E-load, the RIGOL DL3021A. Although LabVIEW recognizes it correctly, there are no drivers for it. Is there any way for me to still use it without drivers or to obtain drivers for it?

Thanks all

[santo_13]

If those work with SCPI programming, you can write the commands and communicate with the instrument.

[rolfk · Accepted solution]

Unless the device uses a proprietary USB interface protocol, you can usually write your own driver very easily by using NI VISA. All the Instrument Drivers in the Instrument Driver Network were developed in the same way.

https://www.ni.com/en/support/downloads/instrument-drivers/tools-resources.html

This is an overview of the possible resources.

Developing LabVIEW Plug and Play Instrument Drivers describes how you would go about developing your own driver. This is a full featured description to create a complete driver. For your own projects you can often live with a partial driver that only implements what you need for your application.

LabVIEW Instrument Driver Guidelines describes what a driver should look like and what minimum requirements it needs to have in order for it to be possible to submit to the Instrument Driver network. You don't need to follow all these points if you do not intend to submit it, but it is still a good document with lots of useful tips.

LabVIEW Instrument Driver Studio is a software installation with support tools and wizards and what else that takes care of some of the boiler plate generation of Instrument Drivers but still requires you to eventually fill in the actual communication with your device according to its Programmer Reference Manual. For a quick and dirty driver it is almost certainly overkill but if you want to develop an Instrument Driver for submission to the Instrument Driver network, or intend to write several instrument drivers, then it can be a very helpful tool.

One possible shortcut is to download a similar driver for a different device and/or manufacturer and modify it to work with your device. However in my experience if you want to do it correctly this almost amounts to the same work, as you need to rename many functions, remove all references to the original device, cull the resulting driver of anything that does not apply to your device or that you did not modify to apply to your device because you don't use it, and don't underestimate the effort to change all the icons to use a correct instrument prefix. 😁