convert hp4294a drivers to hp 4195a

[Sophita]

Dear all, 

I am having trouble with a code. I already have one that does exactly what I want but involves the hp4292a impedance analyzer drivers, and my instrument is a hp4195a network analyzer. If anyone knows how to convert the code without interfering to the drivers, please, share with me 🙂

Hope this finds you well,

Sophita 

[Dennis_Knutson]

There is an unsupported 4195 driver at http://sine.ni.com/apps/utf8/niid_web_display.download_page?p_id_guid=18F60C81381C52BAE0440003BA230E...

That is a good starting point.

[Sophita]

That is indeed a good starting point, and thankfully they work perfectly with my instrument, but the driver s capabilities seem limited to me.

Is there another way? I could change the hp 4294a drivers so as to meet my prerequisities but I am trying to avoid that.   

[Dennis_Knutson]

You would have to edit either the 4195 or 4294 driver.

[Sophita]

That is true. But I was thinking about changing the HP IB commands in the 4294a drivers. And replace only the initialize.vi and cloze.vi of the 4294a with the drivers of the 4195a. I believe this is feasible, isn`t it?

Thank you very much for your time Dennis_Knutson 🙂 Appreciated!  

[Dennis_Knutson]

I don't understand what that would accomplish. If you change the scpi commands in the 4294 to work with 4195, you've created a new 4195 driver that says it's for a 4294. It would work but it sounds confusing.

[Sophita]

I have the vi attached to this post. I have been asked to modify it accordingly and make it work with the 4195a network analyzer. The problem is that there exist only some unsupported drivers and they do not fully cover my needs. I thought about two options for handling additional instrument drivers for the 4195A. The first one was to create them from the beginning, which I do not know how to do and suppose will take too much time until I find out. The second option (more favorable) is to modify the existing drivers (of the 4294A). However that is tricky, because even if I change the low level commands, and adjust the code accordingly, they will still be drivers that will not support communication with the 4195A network analyzer, but with the 4294A, isn`t that so?  

Thank you for your time 🙂

[Dennis_Knutson]

If you change all of the functions in the 4294 driver to instead work the 4195, the driver will not support the 4294 anymore. Why don't you think your changes will take affect? As I said either modify the existing 4195 to add the new features or rewrite the 4294 and save as a a new 4195.

[Sophita · Accepted solution]

That is extremely helpful. I was afraid that if I modify the 4294A drivers to 4195A, there would be no communication between the network analyzer (4195A) and Labview. I have another question though. I have already changed some of the 4294A drivers, and saved them as 4195A. But I will need the initialize.vi and close.vi,  found at the 4195A palette menu. If I use those two VIs in my code AND the saved modified drivers, too, will my code work? If not, should I build new initialize.vi and close.vi?

Thank you so much!

[Dennis_Knutson · Accepted solution]

The initialize VI from the 4195 should still work. Are you creating a new 4195 project? Just add the old VI to the new project.