IEEE-488

IEEE-488, also known as GPIB or HP-IB, comprises a set of standards which allows various test and measurement gear to be controlled and queried remotely.

The following standards are involved:

• IEEE-488.1: Mechanical, electrical and basic protocol.
• IEEE-488.2: Formats and common commands.
• SCPI: Standard commands, built on top of IEEE-488.2. The standard is available here.
• USBTMC: The USB TMC device class, standard is available here.
• LXI: The LAN eXtensions fo Instrumentation, standard is available here.

While IEEE-488.1 defines the "Centronix-style" parallel connector, the other standards are in fact seen over other types of connections: RS-232, DB25 parallel connectors, and so on.

sigrok aims to support all of this: all of the command sets, on any device supporting them, across any interface.

GPIB PC interfaces

See GPIB interface comparison for a list of GPIB interfaces we know about.

See Supported hardware#GPIB_interfaces for the list of devices planned/supported in sigrok.

Command sets

Command set	Status	Comments
SCPI	supported	Various transports are supported: serial, tcp, usbtmc, vxi, visa, libgpib.
IEEE-488.2	not yet supported	Standard document needed

Devices

Various GPIB/USBTMC devices are supported, see Supported hardware for details.

Protocol Decoder

The sigrok IEEE-488 protocol decoder supports the parallel GPIB as well as the serial IEC variants.

Resources

• IEEE-488 overview at Wikipedia.
• SCPI overview at Wikipedia.
• GpibProgTut.pdf is a nice GPIB Programming Tutorial
• The linux-gpib project consists of a series of Linux kernel drivers supporting various GPIB interfaces, and a userspace library in C to communicate with these drivers.
• The gpib-utils project uses linux-gpib to provide access to a series of GPIB-devices. It also supports VXI-11 connectivity.
• An excellent GPIB tutorial by Dr. Pápay Zsolt.
• Agilent's USBTMC (Linux) Kernel Driver Documentation