BASIC GPIB comms

[WayneL]

Hi

I need to comms with some old equipment that uses GPIB, but new equipment
seems to have problems. I have programs in HP-Basic. Is there a very
simple BASIC operating systems that can talk to an old ISA card.
E.g Q-DOS

Cheers


Wayne

 

[Robert Baer]

WayneL wrote:

Hi

I need to comms with some old equipment that uses GPIB, but new equipment
seems to have problems. I have programs in HP-Basic. Is there a very
simple BASIC operating systems that can talk to an old ISA card.
E.g Q-DOS

Cheers


Wayne


About a year ago, i was able to find GPIB programs on the web; 20

years ago (or more) source code was available in BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL,
ALGOL, and Assembly.

 

[Aidan Grey]

On Sun, 10 Apr 2005 21:28:25 GMT, WayneL wrote:

Hi

I need to comms with some old equipment that uses GPIB, but new equipment
seems to have problems. I have programs in HP-Basic. Is there a very
simple BASIC operating systems that can talk to an old ISA card.
E.g Q-DOS

Cheers


Wayne

What kind of equipment are you trying to talk to? Is it old enough that is
meets the IEEE-488.1 standard instead of IEEE-488.2?

What type of computer and GPIB controller are you try to use? What
software are you trying to use with it?

You may get more help if you post to the newsgroup:
natinst.public.gpib.general. It is the place to ask if you are using a
National Instruments controller.

Aidan Grey

 

Aidan: He's obviously trying to run/port some old test code written in
RMB - ergo your cookbook sales probes are irrelevant. 488.1 vs. 488.2
doesn't mean jack if the program ran on HP/Basic aka RMB. The level at
which RMB code talks to HPIB makes 488.1 vs. 488.2 irrelevant - RMB is
old-school - what *real* GPIB programmers really do. No wussy
plug-and-play driver with girly visual programming interfaces like
LabView or VEE!

Wayne: you need to decide if you want to stay on HP/Basic or not. If
yes, look for a used 9836C or 9000/345 (etc.) *with RMB/WS* install
disks. It's not pretty but you can find these pretty cheap. Getting
data off an RMB/WS is a major pain in the butt. Find DOS CSUBs or use
Kermit over RS232.

If you have your source code already on a PC you need to decide if you
keep the code in RMB or translate to something else. Last I heard TAMS
had services for getting source off RMB/WS media. Otherwise, get the
DOS csub for RMB/WS or use Kermit to transfer a SAVE'd version (not
STORE'd) of your code. If your code uses CSUBs you're out of luck -
you'll have to stay on RMB/WS or find someone to rewrite it from
scratch.

Otherwise you need to move your code out to something else. HT-BASIC
*is* the best alternative - TAMS is former HP folks who have the
orginal RMB source code! It's as clean a solution for PCs as you'll
probably get.

Trying to use an ISA GPIB card is a major uphill battle. I'd advise
against it - even using "free" student slave labor. If you're very,
very lucky you might have one of the specific ISA GPIB cards that have
an Open Source driver on Linux. Regretably the odds are against you.
You best bet is to spring for a PCI card. Yes, National Instruments
makes a very good PCI card. So does Agilent.

At that point, I'd use HT-BASIC but otherwise you can also translate
your code to C, VB or something else. Again, TAMS sells some tools for
this. There are also some open-source programs floating around to do
translation. It can also be done by hand once you get a feel for the
coding differences.

M