How can data on a HP300 computer be transferred via the printer port to a LabView app ?

[jpday]

I have several legacy HP300 based test systems, and I would like to be able to extract information from them in an electronic format . It seems reasonable that if I connected to the printer port of the HP system with a LabView host via the IEEE interface, I should be able to capture an ASCII stream from the HP computer. Has anybody done this ?

[mikeporter]

I haven't done this thing specifically, but the tricky part will be whether the HP300 will be happy as an IEEE-488 non-controller. Because the main purpose of the interface was to drive a printer, the computer might be essentially "hardwired" as a bus controller.

Of course, you could let the HP300 be the controller and drive the whole process, but then you'll have to deal with writing a loop in LV to watch the port and emulate a printer (or plotter) -- definately doable, but potentially messy.

At some point you need to consider how much these legacy systems are really worth in terms of your time.

One solution might be to turn the HP300s into doorstops, and drop in their place a more up-to-date computer like-say the 66MHz '486 Dell I have sitting out
in my garage. Even got a copy of LV 3 to throw in with it! 🙂

Mike...

[Albert.Geven]

the trick is to make your system listener and read as long as data is coming from the hp.
so opposite to the previous answer.
Look in the archives to search for labview /gpib as listener. There was a discussion about oscilloscopes and a discussion about faking a plotter.

[Rob Cole]

Yes, it's been done. The last place I worked, we had some HP300s that we phased out and had to get data from. We did it straight, GPIB to GPIB. We built a short HP Basic program for the HP300 to grab the data and toss it on the GPIB and another Visual Basic program to get data from the IBM computer's GPIB. I believe that the HP300 was the GPIB controller. It should be even easier to program using LabVIEW.
I can't supply you with any examples (since I don't work there anymore), but it is fairly simple. Just make sure that both machines are not on the same GPIB address.

Rob