I am currently building a setup for some laboratory testing that will eventually run through labview and have been connecting several machines through GPIB. This has been going well and discovery and communication through NI MAX with the other machines has been established by simply using their plug-n-play drivers from the NI website.
However, despite downloading the driver for the Hp 8508A it is not detected by MAX. I have attempted several proposed solutions including
- power cycling
- Making sure of no address conflicts
- updating NI-VISA
- turning on NiVisaTulip.dll
I am certain that the GPIB board is operational as I have connected to 3 other instruments all of which work nicely. I am however worried about a passage I read in the users manual of this machine :
"At Powere on, the instrument assumes a local state. Under local control HPIB commands will be ignored. To gain control... the controller must put the instrument into the remote state. This is accomplished by sending the instruments HPIB listen address. " It later mentions that this address is (HPIB address +32) and should be put onto the bus in command mode but isnt clear on how and i have little experience in GPIB.
I am not certain this listen address part is the issue behind MAX not finding the instrument, as i would think that the instrument would be detected even if it wasnt accepting commands. Regardless, any advice on either part would be most appreciated.