GPIB without driver?

[TT_Tan]

Hello,

I have a legacy instrument that we suspect is suffering from solid states memory failure.

It's an old lock-in amplifier that is made and programmed by the manufacturer. 

There is no longer manufacturer support and we are pretty much left on our own. 

I managed to enter the software directory and found out that it's running on DOS.

What strikes me is that although it has an ISA GPIB card, there is no GPIB driver that can be located. 

The instrument control was via GPIB. 

Am I right to say that even in the embedded computer there should be a GPIB driver for DOS?

Thanks!!

TT

[Makoto]

If your PC is running DOS and its has an old NI GPIB card on the ISA slot, you need "NI-488.2 Software For DOS".  It can't be found on download sites so you need contact NI support.

If you are trying to run the old DOS GPIB app on a recent Windows PC in a DOS BOX, you can set up GPIB DOS emulation driver, allowing old DOS GPIB apps run in a DOS BOX. But as I know it works until XP.  Vista and 7 do not work.  See the following pages:

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/3420

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=140&thread.id=20178

[TT_Tan]

Hi,

I should have made it clearer. What I meant was that I can't find the presence of GPIB driver in the embedded computer that we probed. I managed to download and installed a copy of this DOS driver in another DOS computer, realised that a folder was created as a result of this installation. On my embedded, this is not there. Could it be that the folder/driver was deleted/lost?

Best regards

[Makoto]

As I remember the old DOS GPIB driver from NI normally installs to <product name> subdirectory under the system root. For example, it will be "C:\AT-GPIB"

If the setup does not goes well, you can decompress all the compressed files from driver's floppy disk, copying them into above target directory.  Then you will need modify CONFIG.SYS to load GPIB.COM driver then perform IBCONFIG utility to set up IO base address, DMA, IRQ etc...

[markus kossmann]

No there is no absolute need to use a "standalone" driver. You can also program the GPIB controler hardware directly without a driver if you have complete hardware/programming documentation for the  GPIB controler. Or use a programming library which uses direct hardware access and is statically linked to into the embedded devices firmware.   Of course this is bad idea if you expect to change that controler to another model sométime. But I don't think that this was expected in your embedded installation.   

[TT_Tan]

Hi Makoto and markus, Thanks! I tried installing the DOS driver and found the folder as Makoto mentioned. But this folder is missing from the embedded. As Markus pointed out, so I understand that it maybe that they have created the program without the driver. The strange thing is there is no drivers at all, not even for their stepper motor driver board. 

That being the case, I really don't know why the system went dead...