Is a USB to GPIB dongle/convertor a difficult project ?

just try this :

it does quite the same online ! and free (too ?)

I believe John meant something like a partial enterprise database, to look up their own stock and also their own modules.

On a sunny day (Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:10:22 +0100) it happened Jean-Yves wrote in :

Nice site, bookmarked it, thank you.

seems you can also do some kind of "simple" inventory with their "partlist" feature on the site...

If you only want to do that locally for your own stock parts you can use a database. Some allow to place links into fields and those can either point to a URL on the web or to a file on your own server. Then one click and the datasheet, photo or whatever shows up.

Now I just wish Works could do that because it contains a database part that has never crashed on me in almost two decades. But I guess one can't have it all.

Writing test control software for GPIB instruments was one of the things i did for part of my job 20 to 30 years ago. Of course back then it was DOS based or specialized workstations and NI was just getting started.

Once upon a time i built a GPIB board and developed the driver software. The board was based on the Motorola 68488 chip. It required electrical line drivers and tight software to integrate nicely. It connected to a SYM-1 SBC based on a 6502. Had to learn the spec pretty well to pull it off. I also attached a bus extender, which fed the GPIB board, a floppy disk controller (back in the 8 inch days), and a real time clock. I integrated all this with a two chip ROM tiny basic interpreter and got it all to play together well. Some of the best fun i ever had.

products

Wonderful, some over edjumacated idiot foolishly insisted on combining the several interacting state machines into one monster which probably now takes an "E" size sheet to be big enough to read.

Sort of like this one (my favorite):

Regards

Klaus

st

I did something simelar once. I did not have the money to buy the NI cards and cables and got stubborn.

So I bought USB to serial converters for the instruments and just hooked up a USB hub. The USB to serial converter costs 20USD. (prolific are good).

It worked well with the HP instruments, but my tek scope needed precise timing of TX and handshaking. The simple USB serial convertes do not handle handshaking well, so I needed to slow down the transfer rate and thus transferring scope pictures took to long

So, I bought a 4 serial card and ran 4 serial cables instead. This way some of the NI drivers work right off the bat

Regards

Klaus

They not only picked it, they developed it before there was GPIB, which always explained a lot of things, to me.

RL

But the problem with much of the lab equipment, especially HP, is that they do not have any serial interface. There is only the GPIB.

Still doesn't make sense. Around the time it became popular others had a much simpler serial bus figured out, for example the institute where I did my master's project. Instead of prohibitively expensive garden hose cables we could use cheap telephone wire and did not have the length restrictions.

Of course HP keeps using it, they invented it.

Well there were two issues, HPIB (later renamed GPIB) was available on HP instruments and serial was not. And with the advent of logging DMMs, VNAs, digitizing 'scopes, digital SAs and such, the 1000 to 1 data transfer speed advantage added up. GPIB also has group execute trigger (GET) which can cause a group of instruments to go through a sequence of measurement and switching accumulating a chunk of measurements is a short time. Followed by reading the instrument data at a more reasonable pace.

Sure the bus has a few (very few) advantages but let's face it, 99% of users wanted to do one thing: Document the results.

And the users around them have moved on. I bought a Taiwan-engineered scope. Has three (!) USB ports. Don't want to schlepp the laptop? No problem. Stick a little USB flash memory into the front connector, hit "Save". It lets you select whether to store just an image file or the whole works plus CSV data. Sweet.

If you store in PNG each screen shot is around 5kB. Comes out crisp and clean when imported into a PDF report. You still can store thousands of them even if there is only a really old 16MB stick in your tool box. AFAIR there is also a way to pipe them to a cell phone. "Hey, Joe, can you take a look at the weird spike about 40% up the slope?"

I guess not, at least at the time it was invented (no GUI OS,...) Almost all what people wanted was automation. For documentation purpose they had either... cameras, printers/plotters,...

Nope. My Dolch Logic Analyzer always provided nice files via its RS232 port which I could then import into DOS-Word. You do not need a GUI at all to create nice-looking documents with graphics and instrument screen shots in there. The drill was always the same: Find problem such as bus contention or glitch, insert picture to show the problem, type up solution, draw solution on OrCAD SDT or in some cases Futurenet Dash, insert schematic into document, done.

Of course then there were those instruments such as HP that didn't have RS232 and we had to use the old Polaroid cameras. The goo from the back of those instant pictures could cause really nasty stains on clothing. Afterwards I used a Logitech hand scanner (ScanMan or something like that) in order to create an image file that could be imported into DOS-Word.