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

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

and was called HP-IB ( Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus). Since HP-IB was originally designed to only work with HP instruments, the need arose for a standard, high-speed interface for communication between instruments and controllers from a variety of vendors. This need was addressed in 1975 by the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE has a corporate office ...

(IEEE) published ANSI/IEEE Standard 488-1975, IEEE Standard Digital Interface for Programmable Instrumentation, which contained the electrical, mechanical, and functional specifications of an interfacing system. The standard was updated in 1987 and again in 1992 This bus is known by three different names, General Purpose Interface Bus ( 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:

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...

, Serial, PCI, and PXI.

Software

In addition to the hardware bus to control an instrument, software for the PC is also needed. 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 language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

s and defined in-depth specifications to guarantee interoperability of components within each framework. Instruments can be programmed by sending and receiving text based SCPI commands or by using an 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 LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI,

MATLAB MATLAB (an abbreviation of "MATrix LABoratory") is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementat ...

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

References

External links

Instrument Control Fundamentals
Presents technical content through theory, real-world examples, and interactive audiovisual tutorials - From National Instruments
VXIplug&play

IVI Foundation

Development Hints and Best Practices for Using Instrument Drivers - From Rohde & Schwarz

History

Software

See also

References

External links

Further reading