Has anyone written a driver for the Labsphere SC-5500?

[saturn 2]

Earlier today I used entered the commands through Hyperterminal and observed the same behaviour; the INVALID COMMAND ERROR message was being displayed on the instrument, be the instrument still performed the command. I will try to get a hold of the vendor (a difficult task) to see whats going on.

[Ray.R]

What does your command look like?  It appears that it is partially valid because the intrument did react.  So maybe the parameter is out of bound..

The good thing is that you confirmed that the error is not related to Labview.  So you'll need to focus on having the correct set of commands.

R

[saturn 2]

So an example command that I would enter would be:

A1X

This command turns off the auto ranging mode of the instrument.

I have attached the documentation that came with the device. On page 20 of the PDF  (page 18 of the document), the programming commands can be found. As far as I can tell, I am entering the commands in with the correct syntax.

[ShotSimon]

What is your hardware flow control set to?  -SS

[Ray.R]

Command A1X is a valid command.  It should work, unless it complains if you try to set it to an already active setting.

I agree with SS, what is your flow control set to? 

R

[saturn 2]

I have tried both hardware and none.

This afternoon, I seemed to start getting some consistency with both; I noticed that if you typed a command in perfectly, the instrument would perform the command. However if you typed in a command and needed to backspace at all, the device would perform the command but would give the error message.

Knowing this, I went back in to LabVIEW, and ran one of the programs that I wrote, I noticed that one program would run correctly the first time I executed it, but anytime following, the device would give the error message.

[ShotSimon]

Try using none and typing the commands correctly in upper case  Backspaces will get transfer to the other machine and mess up the programming.  Also remember to end with X.  -SS

Message Edited by ShotSimon on 07-23-2008 03:15 PM

[saturn 2]

Right.

Let me attach my VI. Using the I/O assitant, I have a command with the token "power" that sends the command:

O0X

to the instrument. What happens is the instrument is suppose to relay the power measurement data to LabVIEW and display it on the table that I've created. When I run the VI, the first time everything works. If I run it an additional time, the error message pops on the instrument for about 5 secones, but once the error message goes away, the data is sent.

[ShotSimon]

When I opened the I/O Assitant in your vi  it shows me that you have a Termination charater of "\n" selected.  Remove this and change it to none.

[saturn 2]

I removed the termination character. By doing so, I received a timeout but the data was relayed after the timeout expired. There was no error message on the instrument this time around. I adjusted the timeout length to various values to find the same result.

With the \n termination character, again the system would perform correctly the first time running the command throught the I/O assistant, but running it again would display the error on the instrument.