Linear bench power supply

Like 'HPGL' .. Hewlett-Packard used to innovate and actually create stuff rather than just hawking laser printer toner at inflated prices.

HPIB/IEE-488/GPIB seems to be pretty persistent- older instruments I have offer RS-232 + GPIB and newer ones tend to have Ethernet + GPIB.

--sp

How much newer? I did a survey a few years ago and found almost nothing other than controller cards for PCs. Very few devices have been designed in recent years with GPIB interfaces. I did see some sort of instrumentation bus for a testing environment that seemed to use the protocol, but was not cabled. Maybe they just put the GPIB interface on their backplane. Even that was a few years back and I don't recall who it was.

The current Rigol triple-output power supplies are GPIB + LXI-C compliant Ethernet as standard.

--sp

Yes, you can still buy equipment, but how old is it? I guess there is always a need for old technology. I think the biggest disadvantage to the GPIB interface was that huge honkin' cable and connectors.

That would make it impossible for your scope to get a virus or get hacked. It should be implemented internally by equipment with only Ethernet, like a little firewall.

Well yeah, if you want to be technical.

HPIB was invented in the days when a rear-panel BCD connector was an advanced concept. Minicomputers were exotic and expensive. HPIB allowed a dumb (no uP) rackmount DVM to talk directly to a data logger (a printer with roll paper.)

There is one or two GPIB bus chips availble, but I would assume there is a IP core for a FPGA somewhere.

Cheers

Check this out!

or this

That's a 100:1 price ratio.

But you could probably put that ASIC in a $5 FPGA. In spite of the complexity of the standard, it was done in MSI at one time wasn't it?

That's the NI Dev kit. I have a controller chip here somewhere from the other guys that make them ( or used to). But you can get 66 of them for $1300 or $19 ea.

The seconde link is a single lane PCI-e card, I believe the server cards are 2 lanes per port. I stick to the Intel Pro 1000 CT or PT for performance.

What irks me is the VXI ethernet interfaces, eg Fluke 8846A

Cheers

It was done with 3 488 specific transceiver chips, some ttl latches and state glue to sort out what was what:

The classic chip is the TI 9914A, but I think that it is no more obtainable.

The GPIB protocol is simple enough to be programmed to a Cortex-M chip. However, it needs TTL-compatible driver-buffers.