How To Communicate With SCPI/GPIB In CVI?

[TonyJ]

Recently I inherited an old tester that has CVI 7.1 and TestStand 3.1.  My system has Win2K and 512MB RAM.  There is also a version of Labview that is of the same vintage as the CVI.  We just got a few Agilent E5071C Vector Network Analyzers.  Quickly I found that the IVI stuff on the Agilent site only wrote about 80% of the functions.  I needed limit lines and some other features which weren't developed with the IVI driver. 

The only way to resolve this was to send SCPI commands via the GPIB bus.  Unfortunately I didn't have a tool to do so.  My box has a NI-PCI GPIB card in it as well.  ONe of the guys in the lab fashioned a Labview vi together in about 10 minutes, works great. I don't work in Labview and would like to convert this simple app over to CVI.  Are there any pre-written DLL's that I can use to fill the bill?  If not, can you point me in the right direction?  Thanks.

Tony

[Wolfgang]

Hi,

afaik there is no prebuilt library covering SCPI commands, but required commands can be implemented quite easily; for example, the command viQueryf ( session_handle, "ME:CU?\n", "%lf%*t", &current ) permits retrieving the current limit of a specific power supply; all you need to do is to adapt the instrument specific commands which can be found in the manual of your instrument (I dont' know the Agilent analyzer).

You may also read this

Good luck,

Wolfgang

[markus kossmann]

There is also the an instrument driver from NI for that instrument: http://sine.ni.com/apps/utf8/niid_web_display.model_page?p_model_id=5692

I didn't look into it but it migh include the functions, you are missing. It might also include a function, which allows to write and read SCPI commands/responses.