Creating a VI to interface with a Tektronix Oscilloscope. The Tek drivers all use and pass VISA Resource Name formatted instrument handles. Yesterday, I simply wired a text string with the proper text characters into the Tek driver and it was happy. String = "GPIB::12::INSTR" Today, LabVIEW doesn't like this format mismatch, and I get driver errors. My string format looks OK, but I must be doing something wrong. None of the VISA tools simplty poll the device for its VISA Resource Name. How do I get it? Thanks.

An IVI driver is written in LabWindows/CVI (C code) and then built into a dll so unless you have LabWindows, you cannot change anything in the driver. With IVI, you have to manually create sessions in MAX whereas the VISA references are created automatically when you do a scan for instruments. So, IVI is much more complex. With VISA, you read and write just like you did with GPIB functions. The difference is that the VISA Resource Name is a little smarter in that it includes the interface type (i.e GPIB0::3::INSTR where '3' is the GPIB address). You can open any of the VISA subVIs and just click on the resource name and select the resource. You can even use strings but why type something when you can pick from a list? VISA actually made things much simpler because you can use the same code for GPIB, serial, VXI, USB, Ethernet, PCI, and PXI instruments. VISA was introduced around LabVIEW version 4 and everyone was encouraged to use it soon after that and certainly by LabVIEW 5, the future was clear that VISA was going to be the standard. There is very little reason to use the lower level functions anymore. Lastly, you don't have to use the initialize function with VISA. It really does nothing much except give you the option to reset the instrument and query for it's identity. p.s. VISA is also portable. Not that you would ever want to, but you can use VISA programs with GPIB cards from other vendors. That is not possible with the NI GPIB functions.

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