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Is a USB to GPIB dongle/convertor a difficult project ?

J

John Devereux

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
I think they mentioned LabView interfacing in the doc
section. Supposedly while you can use a program written for an NI card
directly there are ways to make that transfer work.

I'd really only need it to spit out the screen contents. Verbatim, not
as a CSV file or such. IOW straight to the LAN server, hop into the
office chair, send it on to the client, "Here, found the problem and
figure 2 is how it looks after the fix".

I have used it (the prologix) - works well with the stuff I have. The
unit is basically the same size as the GPIB connector, so it
effectively turns your instrument into a USB one. Of course you retain
the ability to anchor your boat.
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jean-Yves said:
just try this :

http://octopart.com/

it does quite the same online !
and free (too ?)

I believe John meant something like a partial enterprise database, to
look up their own stock and also their own modules.
 
J

Jean-Yves

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
I believe John meant something like a partial enterprise database, to
look up their own stock and also their own modules.

seems you can also do some kind of "simple" inventory with their
"partlist" feature on the site...
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jean-Yves said:
seems you can also do some kind of "simple" inventory with their
"partlist" feature on the site...

If you only want to do that locally for your own stock parts you can use
a database. Some allow to place links into fields and those can either
point to a URL on the web or to a file on your own server. Then one
click and the datasheet, photo or whatever shows up.

Now I just wish Works could do that because it contains a database part
that has never crashed on me in almost two decades. But I guess one
can't have it all.
 
J

JosephKK

Jan 1, 1970
0
Winfield said:
Yes, if you want to use prepackage GPIB software.
They're available on eBay. One problem, there's
not much of software around for older instruments.
That may be where Prologix adapters and serial-port
communication could come in (see my other post).

Writing test control software for GPIB instruments was one of the things
i did for part of my job 20 to 30 years ago. Of course back then it was
DOS based or specialized workstations and NI was just getting started.
 
J

JosephKK

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
Is there any link where somebody did that? Drivers would otherwise be
the big roadblock. Me and the world of software are miles apart.

Once upon a time i built a GPIB board and developed the driver software.
The board was based on the Motorola 68488 chip. It required
electrical line drivers and tight software to integrate nicely. It
connected to a SYM-1 SBC based on a 6502. Had to learn the spec pretty
well to pull it off. I also attached a bus extender, which fed the GPIB
board, a floppy disk controller (back in the 8 inch days), and a real
time clock. I integrated all this with a two chip ROM tiny basic
interpreter and got it all to play together well. Some of the best fun
i ever had.
 
J

JosephKK

Jan 1, 1970
0
John said:
I read the spec for an hour or so before I figured out that "message"
was ieee-speak for a logic level on a wire. There's one state diagram
that looks like a pot full of pasta and peas.

John

Wonderful, some over edjumacated idiot foolishly insisted on combining
the several interacting state machines into one monster which probably
now takes an "E" size sheet to be big enough to read.
 
K

Klaus Kragelund

Jan 1, 1970
0
Is there any link where somebody did that? Drivers would otherwise be
the big roadblock. Me and the world of software are miles apart.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/- Skjul tekst i anførselstegn -

- Vis tekst i anførselstegn -

I did something simelar once. I did not have the money to buy the NI
cards and cables and got stubborn.

So I bought USB to serial converters for the instruments and just
hooked up a USB hub. The USB to serial converter costs 20USD.
(prolific are good).

It worked well with the HP instruments, but my tek scope needed
precise timing of TX and handshaking. The simple USB serial convertes
do not handle handshaking well, so I needed to slow down the transfer
rate and thus transferring scope pictures took to long

So, I bought a 4 serial card and ran 4 serial cables instead. This way
some of the NI drivers work right off the bat

Regards

Klaus
 
L

legg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Thanks. Yep, that showed it. Along with fashion socks and other stuff ;-)

Seems they now run silent auctions there as well. It appears the
Prologix solution would be a bit simpler though. I'll never understand
why HP picked that dreaded GPIB bus in the first place, with its
expensive garden hose cables and all that. The site of KE5FX is very
interesting. In case others want to look:
http://www.thegleam.com/ke5fx/gpib/readme.htm

They not only picked it, they developed it before there was GPIB,
which always explained a lot of things, to me.

RL
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Klaus said:
I did something simelar once. I did not have the money to buy the NI
cards and cables and got stubborn.

So I bought USB to serial converters for the instruments and just
hooked up a USB hub. The USB to serial converter costs 20USD.
(prolific are good).

It worked well with the HP instruments, but my tek scope needed
precise timing of TX and handshaking. The simple USB serial convertes
do not handle handshaking well, so I needed to slow down the transfer
rate and thus transferring scope pictures took to long

So, I bought a 4 serial card and ran 4 serial cables instead. This way
some of the NI drivers work right off the bat

But the problem with much of the lab equipment, especially HP, is that
they do not have any serial interface. There is only the GPIB.
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
legg said:
They not only picked it, they developed it before there was GPIB,
which always explained a lot of things, to me.

Still doesn't make sense. Around the time it became popular others had a
much simpler serial bus figured out, for example the institute where I
did my master's project. Instead of prohibitively expensive garden hose
cables we could use cheap telephone wire and did not have the length
restrictions.
 
J

JosephKK

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
But the problem with much of the lab equipment, especially HP, is that
they do not have any serial interface. There is only the GPIB.

Of course HP keeps using it, they invented it.
 
J

JosephKK

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
Still doesn't make sense. Around the time it became popular others had a
much simpler serial bus figured out, for example the institute where I
did my master's project. Instead of prohibitively expensive garden hose
cables we could use cheap telephone wire and did not have the length
restrictions.

Well there were two issues, HPIB (later renamed GPIB) was available on
HP instruments and serial was not. And with the advent of logging DMMs,
VNAs, digitizing 'scopes, digital SAs and such, the 1000 to 1 data
transfer speed advantage added up. GPIB also has group execute trigger
(GET) which can cause a group of instruments to go through a sequence of
measurement and switching accumulating a chunk of measurements is a
short time. Followed by reading the instrument data at a more
reasonable pace.
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
JosephKK said:
Well there were two issues, HPIB (later renamed GPIB) was available on
HP instruments and serial was not. And with the advent of logging DMMs,
VNAs, digitizing 'scopes, digital SAs and such, the 1000 to 1 data
transfer speed advantage added up. GPIB also has group execute trigger
(GET) which can cause a group of instruments to go through a sequence of
measurement and switching accumulating a chunk of measurements is a
short time. Followed by reading the instrument data at a more
reasonable pace.

Sure the bus has a few (very few) advantages but let's face it, 99% of
users wanted to do one thing: Document the results.
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
JosephKK said:
Of course HP keeps using it, they invented it.

And the users around them have moved on. I bought a Taiwan-engineered
scope. Has three (!) USB ports. Don't want to schlepp the laptop? No
problem. Stick a little USB flash memory into the front connector, hit
"Save". It lets you select whether to store just an image file or the
whole works plus CSV data. Sweet.

If you store in PNG each screen shot is around 5kB. Comes out crisp and
clean when imported into a PDF report. You still can store thousands of
them even if there is only a really old 16MB stick in your tool box.
AFAIR there is also a way to pipe them to a cell phone. "Hey, Joe, can
you take a look at the weird spike about 40% up the slope?"
 
F

Fred Bartoli

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg a écrit :
Sure the bus has a few (very few) advantages but let's face it, 99% of
users wanted to do one thing: Document the results.

I guess not, at least at the time it was invented (no GUI OS,...)
Almost all what people wanted was automation. For documentation purpose
they had either... cameras, printers/plotters,...
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Fred said:
Joerg a écrit :

I guess not, at least at the time it was invented (no GUI OS,...)
Almost all what people wanted was automation. For documentation purpose
they had either... cameras, printers/plotters,...

Nope. My Dolch Logic Analyzer always provided nice files via its RS232
port which I could then import into DOS-Word. You do not need a GUI at
all to create nice-looking documents with graphics and instrument screen
shots in there. The drill was always the same: Find problem such as bus
contention or glitch, insert picture to show the problem, type up
solution, draw solution on OrCAD SDT or in some cases Futurenet Dash,
insert schematic into document, done.

Of course then there were those instruments such as HP that didn't have
RS232 and we had to use the old Polaroid cameras. The goo from the back
of those instant pictures could cause really nasty stains on clothing.
Afterwards I used a Logitech hand scanner (ScanMan or something like
that) in order to create an image file that could be imported into DOS-Word.
 
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