GPIB-USB-HS no longer supported on recent macOS 13

[astrzelecki]

Hi, I brought GPIB-USB-HS adapter from work to play with my old Solartron 7150plus calibrations on my private Mac, but then I found NI-488.2 21.5.1.dmg does not support macOS 13 and included .kext cannot be loaded.

Do you plan to release newer drivers for macOS or this adapter is no longer supported on macOS?

[NatFortune]

Mac users gave LabVIEW its start, but when it comes to the software and hardware drivers needed to make use of LabVIEW,  NI is abandoning them one by one. First PCI/PXI, now GPIB.   IF you are looking for an alternate VISA for Mac OS see below, but they also don't support GPIB. 

Here's what NI says: from https://www.ni.com/pdf/manuals/ni-visa-macos-2023-q3.html

NI-VISA 2023 Q3 for macOS supports the following platforms:

• macOS 12

Note  NI-VISA for macOS no longer supports GPIB and PCI/PXI passports.

To run VISA on Mac OS 13, your two current options (to my knowledge) are 

(1)  R&S VISA 

(2)  PyVISA + pyvisa-py  backend (a pure python driver)  or R&S visa backend 

Unfortunately, R&S VISA doesn't support GPIB at all and pyvisa-py currently only supports GPIB on Linux and Windows.  Somebody would have to contribute Mac OS drivers. 

PS: I just went through all this myself, so here are some additional tips if you want to run VISA on on Apple Silicon (M1, M2 chips) under Python:  

(a) to run PyVISA with R&S VISA:  

create file .pyvisarc under /Users/youraccount with following text:

[Paths]

VISA library: /Library/Frameworks/RsVisa.framework/Versions/A/RsVisa/librsvisa.dylib

this is needed for PyVISA to find the R&S visa libraries

(b) alternatively, To run PyVISA with Pyvisa-py in a virtual environment on Apple Silicon, you should do the following to following make sure the PyUSB backend is properly installed: 

### test installation

CONDA_SUBDIR=osx-arm64 conda create -n pyusbtest python=3.10 -c conda-forge --override-channel 

conda activate pyusbtest

conda install pyusb libusb -c conda-forge --override-channels

conda env config vars set CONDA_SUBDIR=osx-arm64

conda deactivate

conda activate pyusbtest

here pyusbtest is the name of my virtual environment, created using condo. 

You should also install pySerial for serial aand a couple of other helper programs  for TCPIP

[elkanliu]

I have also encountered the same problem, I don't know when my OS 13 can use GPIB, can I respond to the official response