GPIB Timeout issues

[Mark_BFN]

I am having issues with my GPIB device timing out (Error 6) at random intervals, mostly when I am doing intense GPIB communication in loops. As a test, what I have done is read the status of the GPIB device in an infinite loop with no wait timer. I do a write, then I do a read, and output the status to an indicator. It works fine for sometimes 30 seconds+ until it dies with the GPIB status bits flagged differently as follows:
14 16384 TIMO Timeout
15 -32768 ERR Error Detected

Doing GPIB I/O with this device always works fine until I start sending it commands with less than 1/10th of a second wait in between reads and writes. Is my device simply fouled up from sending it so many commands, or is there something I can do in the software to avoid
such an issue? I'd rather not have to manually pause between every read/write, because it slows my app down and may not be always necissary.

my timeout is set to 10 seconds on the gpib read. Any suggestions appreciated. thanks

[ryanm]

Mark,

Error 6 indicates I/O operation aborted. If I were to take a guess, you are encountering a handshaking problem when the wait is less than 100 ms. This problem doesn't occur all the time that is why the program runs for while and then an error is received.

If your LabVIEW code is reasonably small or if you could simplify it down to the problem described above, post it and I will take a look at it for you. In addition, could you include a spy capture of the program encountering the error?

[Mark_BFN]

I've contacted my vendor and come to find out their 3rd party (measurement computing board) in the device has some reproducable issues with using NI's gpib-32.dll. Hopefully they're onto the fix, but in the meantime I'm lucky enough to use serial port communication instead.

I'll be sure to dig into the spy capture program in the future whenever problems arise agian. Thanks for the hints.

[ryanm]

No problem. I hope the vendor can release a fix, which will resolve this issue for you.