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Making a GPIB Device Work

I have installed an NI GBIP controller card. I am attempting to use this to communicate with a Fluke 8846A digital multimeter using this driver. I have never attempted to use LabVIEW with a GPIB contoller, and I do not understand how to locate the device. I've been plugging in various permutations of the references found in the LabVIEW Help file about specifying a VISA resource name, but I have not succeeded in taking a reading from the device with the sample VI's in the above driver.

Here are screenshots of the details I have been able to find about my device.

The first image is the Device Manager entry for the card; the second image is the front panel of a VI from the driver I linked above, with the pull-down menu open on the reference field (I can't figure out what the reference should be); the third image is the card's entry in MAX (which I've really never used, I just stumbled across it).

(Edits made to post to correct HTML mistakes.)

Message Edited by DJDDA on 05-22-2008 02:50 PM
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Message 1 of 8
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I don't understand your screenshot of MAX at all. Do you have PXI chassis or are you using a regular pc? With a pc, the GPIB board should show up directly under Devices and Interfaces.
Message 2 of 8
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It's a regular PC.  (Bah!  Troubleshooting suggestions?)
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Hello,
You will need to scan for your instrument in MAX, and then in LabVIEW you can select your device from the VISA resource drop down menu.
Please see the attached image.
Christian A
National Instruments
Applications Engineer
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Hitting "Refresh" in MAX isn't showing me my GPIB controller. All the documentation I've read so far seems to assume that the GPIB controller is showing up; I don't see any troubleshooting for a lack of a controller in MAX.

I'm going to try moving the card to a different slot, and if that doesn't work I'm going to try older versions of drivers. Does anyone have any other possible suggestions for getting me access to the card?
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Selecting refresh is completely different than doing a scan for instruments.. To scan for instruments, you right click on the controller.

In your earlier image of MAX, you have a PCI-GPIB on PXI bus 1 and with an alias of 'firefire'. Is the alias something you assigned? Besides showing up here, the address and alias are strange. If you did not do the alias assignment, I don't understand how this could have happened. You might want to do some cleanup and the first thing I would try is removing the visaconf.ini file. First see if you have multiple copies on your system. Power down, remove the GPIB card and then reboot.  See what MAX lists. If that looks okay, power down, insert the GPIB board, and look at MAX when the boot finishes.

I also think that moving the GPIB card to a different slot is a good idea.

Message 6 of 8
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I named it firefire.  I just wanted something distinctive that wouldn't be in use elsewhere.
 
Anyway, while attempting to reinstall drivers, I got some weird noise from a set of ICS drivers for a different instrument we once used.  I removed the ICS drivers completely and--ta-da!--everything started working. Smiley Very Happy
 
Thanks for the replies, they did a lot towards helping me to get oriented.
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Good news.

p.s. It's a bit confusing for you to refere to either the ICS board or your NI board as an instrument. They are not. They are controllers. Also, I don't think you will run into problems but assigning an alias to the controller is probably unnecessary. In this case, it was just confusing because I don't think I've ever seen that done before.

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