In Chapter 10, "Signal Measurement and Generation: Data Acquisition," we learned many new acronyms related to data acquisition and DAQ hardware. Instrumentation also introduces some new acronyms, which are listed next. Some of them you probably already know!
GPIB: General Purpose Interface Bus. Less commonly known as HP-IB (Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus) and IEEE 488.2 bus (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers standard 488.2), it has become a world standard for almost any instrument to communicate with a computer. Originally developed by Hewlett-Packard in the 1960s to allow their instruments to be programmed in BASIC with a PC, now IEEE has helped define this bus with strict hardware protocols that ensure uniformity across instruments.
IVI: Interchangeable Virtual Instruments. A standard for instrument drivers (software that you can use to control external instruments) that can work with a wide variety of different instruments.
LXI: LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation. A standard proposed by the LXI Consortium (http://www.lxistandard.org) for an instrumentation platform based on industry standard Ethernet technology designed to provide modularity, flexibility, and performance to small- and medium-sized systems.
RS-232: Recommended Standard #232. A standard proposed by the Instrument Society of America for serial communications. It's used interchangeably with the term "serial communication," although serial communication more generally refers to communicating one bit at a time. A few other standards you might see are RS-485, RS-422, and RS-423.
SCPI: Standard Commands for Programmable Instrumentation. A standard proposed by the SCPI Consortium (http://www.scpiconsortium.org) that specifies a structure and syntax for communicating with instruments, using simple, intuitive ASCII commands.
USB: Universal Serial Bus, a standard bus on most PCs for connecting external peripherals.
VISA: Virtual Instrument Standard Architecture, a driver software architecture developed by National Instruments. Its purpose is to try to unify instrumentation software standards, whether the instrument uses GPIB, PXI, VXI, or Serial (RS-232/422/485).
