GPIB Communicator

This little program lets you connect to up to 14 devices on a GPIB bus and manually talk to one at the time. 

When started it scans the bus for devices and configures itself. By default there's a list of common commands which could be added to, deleted from, saved and recalled in different ways. You can save a reply from a device directly to a file and also send a file back to a device - handy if you want to save for example an instrument setup and later set up the instrument (or another) the same way. There's a syntax error check utility with two different ways of checking. I haven't tried it on other than Tektronix instruments, however I believe alternative 2 is standard and will work on later models of other brands too.

April 9, 2005 - New version 1.71 !

Changes from 1.7 1to 1.71:

 Changed the dialogboxes when sending datafile to device so sending must be confirmed before the transfer,  

 Changed so the checkbox for finding matching text in the Outgoing Message list while typing is unchecked by default.

Changes from 1.6 1to 1.7:

 Added a checkbox to enable/disable upper case text only in the Outgoing Message box,

 Added a checkbox to enable/disable finding matching text in the Outgoing Message list while typing,

 Added a function, in the File menu,  to send a datafile to a selected device,

 Some text has been changed,

 A few internal changes.

Changes from 1.6 to 1.61:

 A limit of 7 devices that was used for testing of v1.6 was mistakenly left and now corrected,

 A minor bug concerning how the Send button was enabled fixed,

 A couple annoying misspellings fixed.

Changes from 1.5 to 1.6:

  Decreased number of possible devices to 14 to comply with standard,

  Button added so ID from all connected devices could be captured in just one click,

  A couple of Menu items added,

  Increased size of Outgoing Message box so longer commands could be viewed,

  A couple of possible Run Time Errors fixed,

  Save message file on exit always done to the default file fixed so it is now saved to the current file,

  Several internal procedures changed,

Here's a screen shot.

I wrote it because I didn't like the command line utilities which are supplied with the NI card drivers. Anyone who have used them knows why.

Even though it doesn't do very much it's very useful if you want to try out commands and/or figure out the syntax which sometimes could be complex or for some other reason communicate manually with GPIB devices and with the file utilities you could easily send data like setups and waveforms between the PC and a device.

You must have a NI GPIB card with the correct drivers installed.  Find  and download National Instruments GPIB card drivers here.

You must also have the VB5 runtime files installed in your PC.

Personally I mostly run it on old win 98 PC's using PC II/IIA (ISA) cards. I have also successfully tried it with NI cards like AT GPIB (win 98) and GPIB-PCI on Win 2k and XP. I assume any correctly installed and working NI card should work. 

Download GPIB Communicator here. 

Email me with comments. /Hakan