Example programs for Keithley 6517B do not work

[VGH]

I've been trying to use the example programs that come with the driver's for Keithley 6517B with no modifications. Most do not work [I do realize that some are not compatible with 6517B].

I thought these examples have been tested as they are certified by NI.

I am using LabVIEW 2021 (32 bit) and the latest version of the drivers for Keithley 6517B (compatible with VISA 5.4):

Driver Revision: 2.0.2
Original Release Date: 03/07/2016
Current Revision Date: 02/10/2017

My interface hardware is NI GPIB-USB-HS.

The firmware version on Keithley 6517B is A12 700x.

In the example I ran (Keithley 6517 Trace Buffer Store and Read.VI) the error is: 

I have attached the screen shot of the VI with trace turned on on the Block Diagram showing where the error occurs. I am not certain why. Could someone help with this?  

[santo_13]

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I thought these examples have been tested as they are certified by NI.

Just clarifying on the "certified by NI" part, all these drivers are developed, verified by respective manufacturers and handed over to NI to be hosted in the IDNET. It is not practical for NI to purchase all these thousand variants of instruments in the market and verify every single functionality.

In this case, certified means that the code follows the coding standards defined by NI and nothing about whether it will work with the respective hardware.

Now, to your case, since all the functions prior are working, do you know if the operation will complete in 10s (you're setting the timeout to 10000ms)? you could also try increasing the timeout value to 30s or a minute.

[VGH]

Hello Santo, yes, I am pretty certain that a properly setup unit will complete the operation in much less than 10 seconds.

I know this because I tested it by manually setting it up and running the same intended operation. In a manual mode the operation completes in less than 2 seconds.

I changed the constants on the diagram (e.g., changed the measurement from Voltage to Current). This does not even go into effect.

I also introduced a time delay of 3 seconds after the initialization. This was needed in another one of these examples to make that particular (read measurement) example  work.

With above minor changes the instrument does not issue a timeout error, completes the operation, but all 30 readings in the buffer are all exactly zero. 

The read Buffer size is allocated correctly (e.g., in my case I set it to 30).  Also as I said I modified one of the constants to acquire current instead of voltage measurements. The current measurement did not go into effect, the instrument remains in Voltage measurement, and more disturbing is that the instrument front panel indicates Zero Check mode! The trigger does not seem to be active. 

[santo_13]

If you're confident that you've correctly translated the manual settings into equivalent API sequence, it is possible that there is a bug in the command framing or response parsing in the APIs supplied by Keithley.

Now, the next step is to review each API whether it is framing the commands and parsing the responses correctly by matching against the programmer's manual.