EABO when talking to HP3784A BERT

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I am having a hardtime talking to HP3784A (a rather old one). It is
connected to my computer using GPIB-HS-USB cable. The NI GPIB Explorer
can recognize the equipment and its GPIB address, but I am getting an
EABO: timeout when I issue any commands.

On the instrument panel, I can see that the equipment is connected (the
status changes between "Remote Listen" and "Remote Talk" whenever I
send a command using the GPIB explorer), but the GPIB explorer always
reports a timeout. The remote control error status in the HP equipment
is 0 => no errors. Of course, if I send a random unrecogonized command,
the HP3784A properly reports it as an error implying that it is able to
receive my commands properly, but the NI driver on my computer does not
properly recognize the data sent from the HP3784A.

I have tried almost everything: using the NI Spy, and configuring the
EOS settings in the GPIB explorer, but nothing has worked so far. The
only thing I haven't tried so far is the 8-bit EOS compare because I
don't know what byte to use for that.

The HP3784A remote control manual mentions this connections as HP-IB.
So, wonder if there is any difference between GPIB and HP-IB ? (I
thought they were the same, and the name HP-IB is deprecated ?). Has
anyone experienced this problem before ? Any NI app guys in this group
that can help ?

Any help is greatly appreciated !

Thanks,
Vijay.

[MissyS]

Below are some links that discuss this EABO error and ways to correct it.

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/websearch/99FBD4D74B0D5318862562BD00798C24?OpenDocument

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/websearch/2FA525A8585A92E9862566EE002A3755?OpenDocument

One thing to try is to see if the instrument is returning data by using IBIC. You can open IBIC by right-clicking the GPIB device in Measurement & Automation Explorer (MAX) and select "Interactive Control".  Attached is a screenshot of a session similar to what you should try. If you read a number of bytes that is smaller than the total number of bytes the instrument should return, do you get this error? Do you still get the EABO error if you read just one byte?

Are you in MAX when you write and read to the device? Or in a programming environment? Does sending it *IDN? work (if this device responds to this query)?

Regards,