Why is my program crashing on Agilent E8361A NWA?

[Chriss@NIST]

I am trying to run Labview 8.5.1 software, but when I send certain commands to the Agilent E8361A Network Analyzer.  Could it be that the GPIB data is not syncing correctly, how do I figure out where the problem is?

[Albert.Geven]

look at the execution of the blockdiagram with execution highlighting on.

And see what happens

or attach your vi in the next post

[Doiron]

Hello Chris,

Has this application ever worked in the past? If so, what has changed?

Does your application crash the entire computer, LabVIEW, or simply give an error and stop (ie does LabVIEW close or just stop the running application)?

Are you able to successfully communicate using some commands? If so, I second Albert's recommendation to use highlight execution to find out exactly which commands are failing and when.

How are you storing the data? Are you simply outputting it to an indicator on the front panel, saving it to a file, etc?

I would also recommend that you take a look at the LabVIEW help, if you are on the "Index" tab of the help type "Debug". This will show you a long list of topics under "Debug" that are extremely useful debugging tools such as breakpoints, probes, and the aforementioned highlight execution.

[Chriss@NIST · Accepted solution]

Hey thanks for the responses.  It seems to crash during a routine that checks the Status Byte Register.  I monitor each status byte and when 5 and 6 are ready then I move on to the next command.  One of my colleagues suggested not pinging the instrument so often during this routine, so I have added a wait, but won't be able to test the software again until next week.  If I still can't figure it out then maybe I will post the part of the code that fails.  It seems to happen when I ask for more than 201 points worth of information from this particular network analyzer.

Thanks

[Albert.Geven]

Hi

I once had such a problem on a Newport laser controller.

Querying too fast meant that the instrument could not control the laser anymore!

And I definitely wanted it to control a laser.....

[Chriss@NIST]

Thanks for the information, it was a trigger timing issue.  I needed to stop all windows from sweeping, before either saving the data or reading it from memory.!