Timeout often occurs on read because it can take time to prepare the data (especially when the measurement itself is triggered by the read command) but if it occurs on write then check your connections first. Or maybe the device is still busy with processing previous commands if you send many commands too fast.
First you can set a longer timeout delay in the visa settings.
Otherwise there is a simple way to make the program handle such exception: first call the Visa "Clear" function (to flush the device IO buffers so that the faulty command won't interfere and the device will be ready to receive a new command) and then repeat the whole sequence after some time. I'm not using ivi (I mean I use Visa without the ivi layer) so I can't give you the exact syntax but the scheme might be something like (here in a vb-like pseudocode):
repeat=false
do
try
write command
read data
catch IOTimeoutException
repeat=true //set repeat flag
end try
if repeat then
. device.clear
wait a short delay (say 10ms)
endif
until not repeat (you may add "or userabort")
This code should recover gracefully from intermittent timeout errors, whether on write or read.
