Instrument control

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Instrument control consists of connecting a desktop instrument to a computer and taking measurements.

History

In the late 1960s the first bus used for communication was developed by

GPIB), Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus (HP-IB), and IEEE-488
Bus, and is used worldwide.

Today, there are several other buses in addition to the GPIB that can be used for instrument control. These include:

PXI
.

Software

In addition to the hardware bus to control an instrument, software for the

Virtual Instrument Software Architecture, or VISA, was developed by the VME eXtensions for Instrumentation (VXI) plug and play Systems Alliance as a specification for I/O software. VISA was a step toward industry-wide software compatibility. The VISA specification defines a software standard for VXI, and for GPIB, serial, Ethernet and other interfaces. More than 35 of the largest instrumentation companies in the industry endorse VISA as the standard. The alliance created distinct frameworks by grouping the most popular operating systems, application development environments, and programming languages
and defined in-depth specifications to guarantee interoperability of components within each framework.

Instruments can be programmed by sending and receiving text based

instrument driver
. To ease the programming of instruments, many instruments are provided with industry standard instrument drivers such as VXIplug&play or IVI. These drivers require a VISA library to be to installed on the PC. IVI instrument drivers were designed to enable interchangeability of instruments in a manufacturing setting where automation and reduced down-time are important, but they are often used in other applications as well.

Application development environments can support instrument control by supporting VISA and industry standard instrument drivers. Environments supporting VISA include

VEE. Furthermore, the VISA library can support programming languages like C, C++, C#, Python
and others.

See also

References

  1. ISBN 0-7381-4215-8
    .
  2. ISBN 978-0-7381-0665-6
    .

External links

Further reading

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