Hi, I am working on a LabView application to control and monitor 4 power supplies. Two of them are Agilent E3631A (3 channels). The GPIB cable chained PSs are connected to a Windows computer via a GPIB-UDSB-HS cable. The application is built based on a state machine design patern. I have no problem to initialize all 4 power supplies in an Init. state and handle Set and/or Enable output in an event structure for state transition . Read out and display the volt and current in the Idle state.
The problem is that reading out from 2 Agilent E3631A power supplies take very long, about 2 ~ 3 seconds. Other 2 power supplies total takes only less than 200 ms. I understand that E3631A has 3 channels and it takes longer time to command select channel and read out colt and current. But it seems very long to me. Is it normal? Looking into the VISA calls in the drivers downloaded from NI, every VISA read takes about 200-300ms. So it takes 600-700ms to read out volt and current for every channel. For one power supply with 3 channels, it will take about 2s. It is new for me to work on VISA instrument control application. I would appreciate if anyone can shed some light on.
Windows 7, LabView 2012, Driver: Agilent E363X.
