PCI-GPIB perkin elmer 300 windows 7 error

[OldSchoolguy]

Hello,

I'm not expecting much on this since we are trying to do the impossible but here it goes.

We recently started having issues with our Windows 7 32 bit OS connecting to our perkin elmer 300 via the NI PCI-GPIB card while using the AA winlabs program. It give us the following:

> 26.  TestSRQ(0, INVALID)
> Process ID: 0x00000FE4         Thread ID: 0x0000107C
> Start Time: 14:32:58.689       Call Duration 00:00:00.326
> ibsta: 0x8000       iberr: 0             ibcntl: -535560155(0xe0140025)

And continues repeating this error along with some others I have attached. I'm completely at a loss of what to do next and this is my last hope before we have to bite the bullet on a whole new system. It was working for the past year, but now suddenly is giving us this issue.

Some of the things I have tried, we have 2 of these cards, I swapped them and continued receiving this error. I swapped PCI slots with both cards with no luck. I have uninstalled everything and re-installed with both cards, on both PCI slots, restarting between all instances of uninstall/reinstall. I have started over with a fresh installation of windows 7x86, installed all drivers, installed software for the PE 300. Still no luck. I then started to swap out the cable that connects these, but that didn't change anything.

Thanks in advance.

[Cooking_Up_Code]

Hi OldSchoolguy,

You will first want to make sure that the GPIB address of your device matches the GPIB address of the device to which you want to write data. Do you have another computer that you could test this device on? Can you think of anything that was introduced into your system around the time you started seeing these errors?

[OldSchoolguy]

The only thing that happened around that time was a power outage, there wasn't even any windows updates that happened during the time it stopped working. I unfortunately don't have another machine to try this on currently, I've been trying to scrounge around and find one the past 3 days.

As for the address stuff, I'm not the best with these things, how would I do this?

[Cooking_Up_Code]

To check the address of your device, all you need to do is highlight it in NI MAX. The address will show up on the right under Primary Address. Have you been able to confirm that your device is working since the power outage? If your device is SCPI compliant, try using the basic *IDN? test to see if you are able to communicate at all. The bottom of this article goes into a little more on the details on how to accomplish this. Give it a try and post back here what you find.

http://www.ni.com/getting-started/set-up-hardware/instrument-control/gpib-connect

[Dennis_Knutson]

There is some wrong information above and in that link. The *IDN? command is not part of SCPI. It is required by the IEEE-488.2 specification. Also, VISA can be used for all GPIB communication. It is irrelevant whether or its SCPI compliant.

[OldSchoolguy]

Hello all, sorry been a bit busy around here lately, something I'm noticing that may be the issue is that windows itself isn't detecting the card on a consistent basis. When it does through device manager the NI-MAX software has trouble connecting to the device. After a few minutes it will be gone from device manager again and trying to get windows itself to detect the card is very troublesome. We are going to try to replace the computer and see if that solves anything, I'm worried however that the card itself may be the issue, but oddly enough the computer is the cheapest fix for right now. I'll update this after replacing the computer with what happens.