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

[Robert Darlington]

Ethan,

I'm officially apologizing for hijacking your thread.  I promise not
to crash it into any national landmarks.

Curious George, yes, by device, I meant the Prologix adapter.  Not to
be confused with their more standard usb<->gpib box.

-Bob

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Curious George <jorge234q at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi, Bob,
>
>> It handles some of the complexity in GPIB communications.
>> Basically, you open a tcp/ip connection (telnet works) and
>> thow commands at it.
>
> Ah, OK.
>
>> Some commands are to control the device itself, others are to
>
> By "device", here, you mean the Prologix gizmo (?)
>
>> relay the GPIB device commands to the instrument (which are
>> also pretty non-standard and instrument specific).
>
> Yes.  But, to be fair, even as "standardized" as SCSI has
> become, there are always the "unanticipated" issues that
> manufacturers have to squeeze in that the Standard can't
> address.  :<
>
> The problem arises when you get folks "playing cowboy" with
> their interfaces (e.g., the "AT" command sets that modem
> manufacturers freely mangled to suit their interests)
>
>> I was able to get an old Tek 7854 scope talking to a
>> pc in about an hour with the Prologix adapter.  The problem
>> is that my code will only work with this device and there
>> are a lot of guys on the tekscopes list with this scope
>> and without the Prologix adapter.  I
>
> Ah, understood.
>
>> want to rewrite the code to work with a standard interface but don't
>> have a card to do so.
>>
>> I think it would be very interesting if somebody ever came
>> out with a GPIBFS that worked similarly to the OWFS / One Wire
>> File System.
>
> Inferno tries to eliminate many of the incantations that
> are tied to specific implementations out of its device interfaces.
> E.g., to control a TV device, you open /dev/tvctl and throw
> commands at it like:  "brightness 23", "volume 34", "init",
> etc. (i.e., all of the "commands" are ASCII strings)
>
>> The major problems are the inability to anticipate the commands
>> used by a particular instrument.
>
> Exactly.
>
>> 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.
>
> Yup.
>
>> 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.
>
> Yes.  The *small* advantage that Inferno's approach gives is that
> the "programming" can be reduced to a bunch of text strings.
>
> Gee, I can't wait for the "Home of the Future" (and the mess
> that will accompany *that*!)
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