Solartron 1260 and chelsea dielectric interface communication with Labview

[ziedelfahem]

I want to use Solartron 1260 with "chelsea dielectric interface" to characterize some dielectrics. I am using LV 6.1, I found a driver for the solartron but I couldnt do for the Chelsea dielectric interface. Can somebody help me?

[Ray.R]

How are you communicating with the Chelsea dielectric interface?

- serial

- GPIB

- Ethernet

- parallel

- other?

[ziedelfahem]

with a GPIB.

[Ray.R]

Do you have Measurement & Automation Explorer (MAX) installed?

And

Do you have the programmer's guide for the Chelsea Dielectric Interface?

If so, open MAX, under devices find the GPIB device that you have installed.  Make sure it is connected to the instrument and try to send a manual command to the instrument.  *IDN is a typical command.  That would be the first step.

[ziedelfahem]

I don't have the programmer's guide of it, but a query with MAX return "1" and an error ierr=EABO

[Ray.R]

Sounds like a timeout error.

Here are things to consider:

• The message to the instrument may contain a command that the instrument does not understand. For example, the "*IDN?" message is only understood by IEEE 488.2 compliant instruments. If your instrument is an older, non-IEEE 488.2 compliant device, then it will not understand "*IDN?", so it will not generate a message string for you to read from the instrument.
• The instrument may use a particular EOS (end of string) character as its termination method, but you may forget to append this termination character to your message. For example, if your instrument expects a linefeed as the EOS character, then "ID?" will not work, but "ID?\n" (where \n represents a linefeed in IBIC) will.
•  
• You may expect to see EOI (end or identify, one of the five bus management lines) as the termination method, but if the instrument does not set the EOI line when it finishes sending its message, any read operation that you perform will time out.

If you don't have the proper termination character at the end of your commands (*IDN? included) then you will get a timeout error.

You might want to contact Chelsea to see what the termination character is for your device and to get the Programmer's Guide.  You might even try searching the Internet.  I did a quick search on the NI site for any drivers and did not find any.  It does not mean that there are none, I simply searched for Chelsea and did not find anything.  Contact the manufacturer to either drivers or the programmer's guide, otherwise it will be difficult to implement anything.

[Juan_DRAGO_F10]

Hi ziedelfahem!
I also to need development a tool for control of the Solartron 1260 and interface 1296, but I don't find the correct information about how I can setup the interface, and I don't have no answers from support.
Do you have some information, maybe programing manual for the interface ?