Overview

This chapter will give you a deeper look at instrument control. Sure, virtual instruments are the future of instrumentation, but there are a whole lot of non-virtual instruments sitting on benches, and you will definitely find yourself wanting to control them from LabVIEW. And, sometimes there's no question about using an external instrument. If you need to perform mass spectroscopy, for example, we don't know of any mass spectrometer available as a card that plugs into your PC! We'll take a look at the various communications options for instruments: serial communications, Ethernet, and GPIB controllers. You'll learn about VISA, a framework for communicating with all kinds of external instruments. We'll go through the basic steps necessary to get you started with instrument communication in LabVIEW, and point you in the right direction to do your own more advanced instrument control programs.

Goals

• Understand the different ways to connect to your instruments

• Discover the GPIB interface

• Investigate serial communications

• Discover SCPI, a language for instrument communication

• Learn about VISA, a communication framework for instrumentation

• Configure and construct VISA resources

• Learn how to use the Instrument I/O Assistant wizard

• Learn how to find, download, and install instrument drivers

• Learn about VISA VIs for instrument control

• Examine some samples of serial communication