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.

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	Only serial devices are currently supported.
IEEE-488.2	not yet supported	Standard document needed

Devices

Device	Status	Comments
Agilent MSO7104A	planned	USB-TMC. Probably same protocol on various Agilent MSO7xxxx series scopes.
Hameg HMO	supported

See also: Supported hardware.

Resources

• IEEE-488 overview at Wikipedia.
• SCPI overview at Wikipedia.
• 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