[rescue] Need PCI DIO (National Instruments, Sealevel, etc) card!

[Sandwich Maker]

" From: "Robert Darlington" <rdarlington at gmail.com>
" 
" []
" 
" The major
" problems are the inability to anticipate the commands used by a particular
" instrument.  I think by 488.2 standard they have to implement some common
" commands, but the command to dump the value of say the X register on my
" scope (which can be an array of data, a single digit, or alpha character),
" will be different than the command to dump the voltage info on my volt
" meter.  Also, the instruments all have different buttons that can be
" "pushed" via GPIB, each with a different name and no standard naming
" conventions that I'm aware of.  When coding for these instruments, there is
" usually a page or two (or 10 depending on the instrument) with tables of the
" commands.  Without that it would be impossible.

oh yeah...

in the late '80s i ran an automated test system for a development
project.  it had serial links into the system we were developing and a
gpib bus with about a dozen instruments generating different kinds of
signals and faults and switching them around.  one of the more useful
things i did was use the test platform's programming language [m4, go
figure] to create a uniform macro language across all the boxes.  it
took a little work...  but it made the lives of the test writers much
easier.

at startup i had the test system init all the instruments, and i put a
beep cmd at the end of each init string.  it was quite the symphony.
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
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adh at an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought