Hi there, welcome to the adventures of GPIB.

I use a National Instruments GPIB-USB-HS which plugs into a standard USP port on a laptop.? I am using VBA in Excel macros to run a rack of gear to do cell and battery testing.? I have three 34401A meters, a 6673A power supply and a RBL-488 electronic load.? It works pretty well.? Associates of mine are using Python, and I'm going to switch over soon, when my testing schedule slows down a bit.

If the attached image comes through that is one of my outputs, which represents the voltage from a cell at 30 seconds of a high current pules, at different SOCs.

There are other GPIB adapters which work, but I saw some of these at a place I worked and snagged a couple.

Peter

I have gone down this rabbit hole myself over the last 4 years. I have several machines I use to control my instrument setup. The primary controller is a headless Window 10 machine, I access the machine via remote desktop. The machine is a Lenovo M81, i7, 16GB RAM and 1TB of disk storage, the machine has a "low profile" NI PCI GPIB interface card installed. Aside from the standard NI driver install I have installed other useful applications. One package to install is the KE5FX GPIB tools package, it's free and gives you the ability control instruments, receive, save and print plots, save and restore VNA settings. If you install Timelab (also free) you can make Alen Deviation, time variance and other plots.?

I also have Python installed with PyCharm as the IDE. Lastly I purchased a commercial product called HTBasic, it has provided me the ability to develop programs in HPBasic and actually run some of the code samples littered through various HP manuals. With just minor changes I was able to run some short programs in the HP 853A manual that were written for the HP 85. It also allows me to run calibration and confidence testing software written in HPBasic. I have several adapters I have purchased over the years, I recently purchased a NI USB interface but have yet to test it. I mostly use PCI NI cards so I can avoid any driver compatibility issues. Out of all the cards I use I prefer the PCI-GPIB+ cards, these have all the additional hardware where you can interrogate GPIB bus traces down to the bit level, verry similar to a HP 59401A when using the NI GPIB Analyzer software that is part of the default install.

Best Regards,

Craig Petersen

All good info here. I plan most of my ideas as you've outlined them here.

One small change might be my plamned introduction of the GPIB4PI from lightside instruments.

My plan is to control my few pieces of HP equipment on the same bus, using the NI PCI adapter on my PC, and the various NI, HTBASIC, and HP software I have here for that. The KE5FX software may be part of that bus too.

For the other bits of GPIB gear I have, it's mostly orphaned marques: Marconi, Solartron, Farnell, and Racal-Dana. For them, it would be more reasonable to address them in a terminal-server approach. Each piece of equipment, or group of gear, could get its own Raspberry Pi controller with the GPIB4PI pi-hat.

开云体育

I have bought a couple of HP82357B’s via epay, one is clearly a clone and the other, with obvious better built quality is or looks like a genuine Keysight one. Both work identical and very good with pyvisa and Python. Even the SRQ signal will be handled correctly. Normally I do that in a thread. Classic GPIB commands work good, though some older instruments can be difficult to tame. SCPI also works but I don’t like very much. Normally I take data, compose a csv file and plot in Octave. I wrote code for several power meters, spectrum analyzers, signal generators and NF meters. All free to ask, without any qurantee, of course. Work the same on W10 or Linux.

Hello,

I have seen a couple of homebrew USB-GPIB interfaces, including a few buit around an Arduino which look quite simple and can be built at a very low cost. I'm seriously thinking about trying one of these, does anyone have any such experience they would like to share ?
Thanks !

Joel Setton

Hi Joel,

I'm using the homebrew Arduino AR488 adapters on all of my GPIB instruments.

These are cheap enough to spend an individual adapter for every instrument.
These communicate via a virtual (or real) serial ports and are compatible with the Prologix adapter, so the KE5FX toolkit can be used.
To get away without excessive cabelling, every of my adapters has a Bluetooth interface (HC-05 or HC-06 modules work well), which has very good latency.
I have experimented with wifi, but latency was poor. Another advantage of Bluetooth is that every adapter can identify itself with the instrument name. Some of my instruments are so old that they do not understand *idn? yet.
The serial interface also makes programming very simple. One can test out beforehand with a simple terminal program and then use any programming system and language that supports serial ports.
Moreover, with individual adapters, you will never encounter a GPIB address conflict and parallel communication with multiple instruments is possible.
In summary, I'm very happy with my setup. I get screenshots and measurement data from my 8510 and my 8593, I read out power meters and DMMs and I control 8672A signal generators and an Agilent power supply. All very handy.

Best regards,
Tom

The counterfeit NI adapters may not work with the newer versions of the NI software.
I think that version 14 will work with them, not sure when they started to detect the counterfeits.
I have not tried the latest counterfeit adapters so not sure how they do.

ed

I have no experience with the knock-offs.

In the past I have heard stories of such units working but having trouble with drive capability due to cheapening out on the GPIB bus drivers and giving trouble with setups with more than a couple of instruments on the bus or longer cables.? So they may work OK with an instrument or two.

Peter

Hey Ed,

I think NI added a check for counterfeit adapters in their 488.2 software from version 17.6 onwards - They stopped making earlier versions of the software available which was an annoyance for me as, at the time, I used an NI GPIB-ENET/100 which wasn't supported in 17.6+. However, you can still get earlier releases over on archive.org.

TonyG

On 3/21/24 05:03, tom_iphi via groups.io wrote:

Another advantage of Bluetooth is that every adapter can identify itself with the instrument name. Some of my instruments are so old that they do not understand *idn? yet.

That sounds like the way to go!Do you fab these yourself, or buy pcbs, or?

On Thursday 21 March 2024 07:03:48 am tom_iphi via groups.io wrote:

Hi Joel,

I'm using the homebrew Arduino AR488 adapters on all of my GPIB instruments.

Looking that over, that's really pretty nifty!

These are cheap enough to spend an individual adapter for every instrument.
These communicate via a virtual (or real) serial ports and are compatible with the Prologix adapter, so the KE5FX toolkit can be used.
To get away without excessive cabelling, every of my adapters has a Bluetooth interface (HC-05 or HC-06 modules work well), which has very good latency.
I have experimented with wifi, but latency was poor. Another advantage of Bluetooth is that every adapter can identify itself with the instrument name. Some of my instruments are so old that they do not understand *idn? yet.
The serial interface also makes programming very simple. One can test out beforehand with a simple terminal program and then use any programming system and language that supports serial ports.
Moreover, with individual adapters, you will never encounter a GPIB address conflict and parallel communication with multiple instruments is possible.
In summary, I'm very happy with my setup. I get screenshots and measurement data from my 8510 and my 8593, I read out power meters and DMMs and I control 8672A signal generators and an Agilent power supply. All very handy.

I looked over the docs that came with that, and saw mention of using "parallel printer cables" to make cables to use with this setup. I have a fairly large pile of those and no particular use for them. So if anybody might want some, please feel free to contact me off-list at roy AT rtellasonn DOT com and we'll work something out.


--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin

On Thursday 21 March 2024 03:42:50 pm Roy J. Tellason, Sr. wrote:

So if anybody might want some, ?please feel free to contact me off-list at roy AT rtellasonn DOT com and we'll work something out.

That should be roy AT rtellason DOT com...


--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin

So, back on my questions

KE5FX site is very interesting, found some tools to do nice operation, mostly with 8566/68 SAs

He talks about NI and prologix adapters, the price tag on originals are madness. So an NI counterfeit is an option?

Greetings Ruben,

The prices I have been paying on eBay for National Instrument PCI GPIB cards has ranged from $33.00 to $200. It all depends how patient you are and the form factor of the GPIB / GPIB+ adaptor. The "low profile" NI GPIB card I purchased for my primary controller was about $180, this also included the adapter cable to convert the connector on the card to a full size GPIB connector. I have seen GPIB PCIe adapters go for $300+, a bit more than I would be willing to pay for. Once I'm able to test the NI USB HS adapter (paid $86 for) I may post my results, until then I have no idea if it's a counterfeit. It is new in the box, comes from a seller with good feedback from the USA so we'll see.?

I am a big fan of the KE5FX software suite, it does most everything I need to do, everything else is covered by HTBasic, NI IO Trace, NI GPIB Analyzer and or Python scrips. I've used the Phase noise program to plot phase noise measurements with my HP 70k series SA. Used Time lab with a HP 5371A and a HP 5370B to make Alen Deviation plots with ease. I make full use of the console based applications called talk, listen and query. You can piece together some creative batch files to preset instruments with these console based applications.

Best Regards,

Craig Petersen.

I am a big fan of the KE5FX software suite

So am I and the sources are there so you can modify. I also wrote some VB-scripts in Excel to pull in data and use an adapter I built myself: www.dalton.ax/gpib

Hi Roy,

Many thanks for the info with AR-488. I am definitely putting it on my "To do" list !
Sincerely,

Joel Setton

I built a little adaptor using an STM32 to bus drivers which enables it to connect to ethernet (TCP/IP) rather than USB.? This means you can just plug them in, in the various workshops and sit in the warmth and control everything!? It started as a shield for the Nucleo and then became a custom four layer board.

Photo:
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~alanb/EthToGPIB/EthToGPIB.jpg

Interface is basically the same as prologix but with the ability to connect to a full bus rather than just one instrument since it has bus drivers.? I mostly use software I've written myself for e.g. phase noise measurements.? ?I am happy to share the STM32 firmware.

The last piece would be a GPIB-32.dll driver to replace the NI one and this looks quite do-able (I wrote a fair amount of this before personal circumstances got in the way) and this would mean it could drop in with some of the usual software tools on Windows platforms.

Primary reason to build was the excessive cost of read NI units (as opposed to clones).

Alan

Hi,

I can't recommend enough building out a gpib network for 80's/90's era hp test equipment and connecting it to a modern PC. Pulling screenshots/data directly is a huge timesaver, and of course the programming capability unlocks a lot of possibilities for learning and experimentation.

The old HP literature is good for an understanding of the basics, how to wire the network, cable length/configuration restrictions, etc.

Regarding adapter, the NI GPIB-USB-HS seems to be the best adapter by the consensus i've seen, and i've had good experiences with the model.? They also seem to be the most expensive.? I primarily use an Agilent 82357b, which i believe to be genuine, which has worked well for years controlling >10 instruments.? If the budget allows, i'd recommend one of these two models.? The 82357a has been reported to not play well with a lot of software, and the counterfeits are a complete wildcard, so i would suggest avoiding those until you develop the experience to be able to tell whether the adapter or your program is the issue.? Others have suggested the arduino based options, which seem to be popular and are probably your best cost-sensitive option.

There are many ways to approach the software side on windows 10, and any of them may require some fiddling with.? For the NI adapters, install NI VISA, for the Agilent, install Keysight io libraries, and if you want to use both, or tek or keithley software eventually, install both - with it being very important to install NI before any of the others.? Note that these are packages that will take up a few GB and add a bunch of background services that can affect performance, so you may want to do some clean up after the installs complete, or use a secondary machine.

If you go with the 82357b adapter, and the Keysight io library software, you'll get a program called connection expert with the install, which will show connected instruments and give you tools to begin exploring gpib control.? Most instruments of the era you describe, such as the 8566b, will show up as <unknown model>, which is expected and completely fine.

Your 8566b will show its GPIB address on powerup, or with with shift-P.? Once your adapter is connected between the unit and the PC, an entry with that address should show up in connection expert.? Select it, and click "interactive IO".? At this point, open up the programming manual, and start experimenting - for example:?
-Type "KST" (without the quote marks) and press enter or click send, and that will command a preset.?
-Type "ID" and click send and read, and you should get back "HP8566B"
-Type "TA" and click send and read - you'll get back a long string of numbers.? copy and paste into excel or matlab, plot, and you'll see the same trace as on the screen.

Experimentation should give you the basic understanding you need, and allow you to step through the commands that you will later capture into a script or program.? If you go with NI, the installation provides MAX (measurement and automation explorer) which provides all of the same functionality just described.? I haven't personally used them, but I believe the python libraries can also be used similarly.? If you go with a Prologix adapter, the KE5FX toolset includes a terminal for those models.

From here, you can begin developing your own programs in the language and IDE of your choice - Matlab, Python, Labview, and MS Visual C++ seem to be common choices, but pretty much every language under the sun includes support.

I also highly recommend installing and playing with the KE5FX gpib toolkit.? If you have an 82357b, you may need to enable the "Enable keysight gpib cards for 488 programs" setting in connection expert for some of the programs to work.

Hope this helps!

-Jason