Skip to content

GPIB Control

As you have probably noticed, my knowledge base articles are free of advertising. Instead of distracting you with annoying ads, I kindly request your donation. If you find the contents of this page to be useful, please consider making a donation by clicking the Donate button below.

GPIB Control 

Good tools make life much easier. In addition to the common-place tools like multimeters, oscilloscopes, and power supplies, I use a couple of specialized tools for characterization of my audio circuits. Specifically, the HP 8903A Audio Analyzer and HP 3562A Dynamic Signal Analyzer come in very handy. Both of these instruments may be controlled via the HPIB interface. Many of the name-brand, VISA-compatible HPIB controllers are ridiculously expensive. But, thankfully, there are less expensive alternatives. Personally, I find the GPIB-USB Controller by Prologix to provide incredible bang for the buck. The slightly more expensive GPIB-ETHERNET Controller is even more versatile. It can be tucked away in the pile of test equipment and be accessed anywhere on the network, even wirelessly, (provided it's within the same network segment).

Prologix GPIB / HPIB to USB / ethernet controllers

To get the screen shots of my HP 3562A, and other instruments that support plotting through GPIB, I use 7470.exe included in KE5FX's GPIB Toolkit. This software turns your PC into a HPGL plotter. Very handy!

I use various scripts for controlling the instruments. This provides a couple of advantages. First off, setting up some of these instruments requires significant button-pushing. If a step is missed during the setup, the test may run but the results will not be comparable to previous results. Hence, the scripts provide a way to standardize the tests. Secondly, having the ability to launch a script and having it run autonomously provides significant time savings and minimizes notation errors.

At various times I have written small scripts for various test and measurement tasks. I started out with some MATLAB scripts for the Prologix GPIB-USB controller. I later moved to Python and the GPIB-ETHERNET controller for a platform-agnostic solution. Python is platform-agnostic, i.e. the same Python script will run under Windows, OS X, and Linux. My scripts are available for download below. They are provided as-is with no support and are intended as a starting point for people who would like to use the Prologix controllers to communicate with test equipment.

These scripts are not actively maintained.

Please Donate!

Did you find this content useful? If so, please consider making a donation by clicking the Donate button below.