California Inst. drivers

[IVIorse]

What is the best way to go about getting/building a driver for a California Instruments AC Power Source

Manufacturer: California
Instrument Type: Power Source
Model No: PSeries (1001P)
Developement Environment: labVIEW 7.0
Technology: ?
Interface: Serial RS232

Anybody who may have these drivers or advice pointing me in the right direction please let me know. I am new to labview so any help will be great. Thanks in advance.

Also I have already searched for the driver within NI with no luck. So I may have to build it, which right now seems like an overwelming task for a beginner?!?

[Dennis_Knutson]

I did a search and found one this one. It's poorly written, doesn't use VISA, and has some very ugly front panels but it's a starting point. The first thing to do with this is to convert it to VISA so that you can use it with RS-232. That's not that hard to do. Replace the GPIB Send/Receive Messages in CIC_WRT and CIC_W_R.

[IVIorse]

Thats not the instrument I am looking for.

http://www.calinst.com/pseries.html

This instrument is simple; only 5 controls.

[Dennis_Knutson]

And the fact that I said it was a starting point was worth 1 star? With only 5 controls (a fact I was not aware from your original post), it shouldn't take you more than an hour or two to write the driver on your own.

[IVIorse]

As I said before I am a LabView beginner. Every example driver I get seems to be so over complicated to the point where i dont know what the hell is going on and therefore doesn't help me at all. I am not on a tight time frame and i am looking for a push in the right direction. Basically i was introduced to labview about a month ago, wrote one vi which uses the printer port to control a transistor which in turn controls a relay and now I have been asked to write a driver for this peace of equipment. Which sounds easy but everything i look at has 20 something over complicated sub VIs which throws me for a loop. So I'm just a little frustrated and looking for just a little push. I do appreciate the help, thanks again

[Dennis_Knutson]

You might want to give the Instrument I/O Assistant a try. The version that comes with LabVIEW 8 is especially useful. The You'll need to study the instrument's porgamming manual and I would recomend you try the commnds in MAX to get an idea of how they work.

[nyc_(is_out_of_here)]

Personally I rarely use instrument drivers.

I download the instrument's manual and read the section about the GPIB commands.

Then I use MAX to test it out to make sure the commands do what I want them to, then I program the VIs.

[AndrewAlford]

Here is a driver I wrote for the CI1501L.