I wonder if someone has experience or any idea on communicating Ignition with old test equipment using GPIB (IEEE488) communication protocol. I am trying to connect to an Agilent 4278A capacitance meter.
I did some research and found that a GPIB-USB converter or PCI card for PC can be used, combined with driver software (provided by Keysight or National Instruments), but they support only windows technology programming languages (VB6, .NET, C, and so on).
I am not sure if any available serial communication module for the Ignition platform can be used. If not, I am considering a VB6 application just to get data from the meter and store it on a SQL Database, but I prefer using only Ignition. Is there a direct approach possible?.
Thank you for your suggestions.
In addition to the converters available (GPIB to RS232, GPIB to USB and GPIB to Ethernet), you could also try PyVISA, which is a Python wrapper for the VISA architecture.
That Prologix device has a comprehensive manual for its ethernet functions. Write a socket module in jython (I would use Java’s networking layer instead of python) that performs the appropriate commands.
USB would be much more difficult, unless it emulates a simple serial device for use with the serial support module. You’d still have to write your own query-response communication code.
Has anyone solved this question? I have an old Agilent 3458A digital multimeter that operates on a similar GPIB protocol. Can someone comment if they were successful in integrating systems like this utilizing the Prologix device?