Looking for a VISA driver for an agilent 4395A instrument to program with in labVIEW

[staunton]

I found a VISA driver for this instrument but don't know how to use it in labVIEW (dont know if this is possible)
any more suggestions are very welcome,
thanks

[Jeremy Braden]

You may want to consider following up on your previous post. Your question here is pretty vague.

Are you asking how your instrument functions, i.e. what order to send what commands to your isntrument? If so, the best place to look is the instrument manual. That is the single best place to find this kind of information.

If you are asking how to use LabVIEW, i.e. how to wire up a diagram, the I suggest buying a book or taking one of NI's customer education classes. You can find out more about the classes here: www.ni.com/custed .

Are you having difficulties getting the VISA driver to show up as VIs? Are you getting errors when you then try to use them? I recommend in the latter case hooking up the error clusters with an indicator or even w
atching the program in high light execution mode. What error code do you get?

[Kamran S.]

I'd like to clarify some of the terms being used to hopefully help address your question.

When communicating with an instrument there are a couple of "drivers". For the GPIB card that is used to connect to the instruments NI has NI-488.2:
http://digital.ni.com/softlib.nsf/webcategories/85256410006C055586256BBB002C101C?opendocument&node=132070_US

VISA is also a driver and provides an abstraction for different busses. For example, you can use a VISA driver to communicate with an instrument via serial or GPIB with the same programming API.

An instrument driver is a high level API that contains functions or VIs for generating the right commands to communicate with an instrument.

On the Instrument Driver Network there is an instrument driver for the 4
385A:
https://zone.ni.com/idnet97.nsf/nidz/CB97C5E119AEEB9586256ABF004F59E4

This is a contirubted driver, not from NI or the manufacturer, and does not use VISA but uses GPIB VIs. The best way to determine the functionality of the driver is to open the VI in the llb that has an "_tree" suffix.

If you have a VISA based driver that is not in LabVIEW for the instrument you may be able to convert it for use in LabVIEW. For one thing you can call into any dll. If the driver is a CVI driver you can convert it for use in LabVIEW and reduce some of the burden involved with generating the VIs:
http://www.ni.com/support/cvi/visa/

Regards,
Kamran

[KBersch]

I use the VISA driver from Agilent's web site for the 4395A. It has a few problems as you get it from Agilent. You need to use Tools/Instrumentation/Import CVI Instrument Driver to get it to have all the functionallity it's supposed to have. The VIs work well for me using GPIB.

I'll be glad to help in any way I can.

Kelly Bersch
Anadigm
www.Anadigm.com

[staunton]

Thanks for all your comments!
they are very useful, Im new to labVIEW and only getting used to the terms at the moment, I want a GPIB driver for the 4395A to work in labVIEW so I can use it as a subVI in a larger program, I got the plug&play driver from the agilent website and I converted it following instructions given by Kelly and others so now I m just seeing how it works
thanks everyone,
regards,
Staunton

[staunton]

Kelly,
Just wondering I have converted the driver into labVIEW using the instructons given and when I locate the driver in functons>instrument I/O>instrument drivers>hp4305a there are a lot of VIs there (~25) do I need to connect all these in a certain way to have a functioning driver? this seems a little daunting, is there any way else to do it?
Thanking you in advance.
Kevin Staunton

[KBersch]

You have to use "hp4395a init.vi" first and pass the instrument handle it gives to any other 4395A VIs that you use. When you're done you need to pass the instrument handle to "hp4395a close.vi" so the reference is closed. All of the other VIs affect the instrument just as if you were manually adjusting the instrument.

The only VI I know of that doesn't work quite as expected is "hp4395a Avg Bw Vna.vi". The IF Bandwidths that it allows are 2, 3, 10, 30, 100, 1K, 3K, 10K, 20K, 30K. The instrument (with the latest firmware) will actually do 2, 10, 30, 100, 1K, 3K, 10K, 30K. If you try to set 3 you end up with 2 and if you try to set 20K you end up with 10K. That took me a while to figure out.

Let me know if I can help you out in any other w
ay.

Kelly Bersch
Anadigm
www.Anadigm.com