Donnerstag, 3. Januar 2013

Measurement Framework for GPIB, USB-TMC, LAN, ...

The GPIB bus is used to connect and control measurement instruments like multimeters, spectrum analyzers, scopes, ... Most professional measurement instruments offer a GPIB connector, and sometimes additionally Ethernet (LXI), USB (USB-TMC) and RS232 connectors, which offer the same remote control functionality.

Setups with one or more measurement instruments and remote controlled sources are used in production test, device characterization, ... Therefore a controller, usually a PC, sends commands to all instruments and queries measurement results. The test and measurement procedure is implemented as a custom program, which links to libraries to send the commands and receive the results.

The measurement framework pas-gpib provides such libraries to communicate via GPIB, LAN, USB and RS-232 with measurement instruments. It is an open source project hosted at GitHub fully implemented with FreePascal. It was successfully tested with Agilent 34410A multimeter, LeCroy WaveJet 354A and 324 scopes and Keithley 2602A SourceMeter. Demo programs how to use the framework with these instruments are included.

All interested users are invited to test pas-gpib and to contribute more functions, more devices and even more communication protocols. Your feedback is very welcome! Let me know, how you could solve your test and measurement requirements using pas-gpib!