Controlling GPIB Devices

If you're here, I'm assuming you're a senior design student from the future who needs access to the work we did.

This page briefly discusses how to use the ProLogix GPIB-USB controller [1].

Windows

I don't have a Windows computer, but Prologx recommends EZGPIB [2].

You might be able to get PyVISA working under Windows, too. See the Linux section. Good luck.

Linux

Python VISA

Most people will recommend you use Python VISA. A VISA driver allows you to send and receive commands from the GPIB device. PyVISA is a Python ad-on that lets you talk to the VISA driver directly through Python.

Here's the sourceforge page for the PyVISA project. There should be a link there to the PyVISA manual as well [3].

Allow me to direct you to the Mesoscopic wiki for advice [4].

You will also need National Instrument's VISA driver [5].

If you can get this to work, great!

Home brewed solution

We couldn't get PyVISA and the NI driver both installed on the same system. The solution ended up being to write our own program to talk to the card over USB (I'll put the code on this page once I get home from work and have access to it).