How can I determine the physical location of PCI-GPIB controllers.

[Marcateagle]

I have two PCI GPIB controllers in a system and want to insure that a controller plugged into a specific PCI slot is always named GPIB0 and the other GPIB1.  I need to do this without any human intervention - i.e. NOT using measurement and automation explorer to check which devices are plugged into the controller.  How can I accomplish this?

[Albert.Geven]

The only idea is to use the serial numbers and always put them in a specific order in the slots.

In that case the card with the lowst serial number is GPIB0

[Marcateagle]

Thank-you for the interesting idea.  It would be better if I could tie the serial number to a PCI slot somehow.  I don't think I can guarantee that the serial numbers will be inserted in the slots in order.

[skilledengineer]

Hi Marcateagle,

    You can use "VISA Find Resorces" to determine what devices are plugged into GPIBx.  I have attached example code.  I hope this helps.

George

[skilledengineer]

Or, try this VI to get controller information.

-George

[Marcateagle]

Thanks for the input, I should have mentioned that I need to do this using a c / c++ interface.

[Zach-H]

How are you communicating to the devices in C? 

If you have the NI-488.2 driver installed you can use the same functions as the LabVIEW code above. The functions should be in the GPIB/GBIP 488.2 library. 

There is also a ibpad function that looks fairly promising. Here is an excerpt from the LabWindows help about it:

This function sets the primary GPIB address of the specified board or device.

Note: When this function is called and an error does not occur,
the previous primary address is stored in the global
error variable "iberr".

/*-------------------- Prototype ---------------------*/
int ibpad (int BoardDevice, int Primary_Address);