Hello Confused Undergrad,
You have several questions and I will do my best to help clarify. I do not know the capabilities of the OSICS and TUNICS drivers that you have, but there are some basics for using vISA to talk to instruments. Are you communicating via 488.2 or using Serial communication? If you have an NI PCI-GPIB controller, for instance, then you can scan for instruments that are connected to the controller and address the device that way. If you are using Serial communication, you will be addressing the Serial Port you want to talk to. Both of these will appear in Measurement and Automation Explorer (MAX) under Devices and Interfaces. In MAX too, is where you will be able to see the VISA resource name for your device, and then you can send command using the NI-VISA driver.
As for your question about your enable control not being read, I am assuming that this is because your program is written such that the enable button is only read when your program begins. If you have a loop within your program, the control must be within the loop in order to be read repeatedly. Depending on your program architecture however, polling can be inefficient and using an event structure would be more efficient. With an event structure, you can configure an event for when the enable button is pressed and then execute your configuration code. I recommend taking a look at some VISA examples and also looking at how to use an event structure, or re-arrange your program so that your control gets read when you expect it to be. Using Hightlight Execution can help figuring out your dataflow.
I hope this helps. Good luck with your application.
Regards,
Angela
Applications Engineer