Gpibgrok
This page documents some ideas and information for a GPIB-USBTMC hardware interface.
Motivation
There are many ways to communicate with devices that have a GPIB port, and sigrok aims to support as many of them as possible (see IEEE-488). However in this day and age the only reasonable interface for this would have to use a USB device port, since USB host ports are so ubiquitous. The USB standards include a device class specifically made for test and measurement, called the USBTMC class.
Yet most of the GPIB-USB interfaces available don't use this device class; they typically use either a proprietary protocol or serial emulation. There is only one GPIB-USBTMC interface that we know of: the TEK-USB-444 from Tektronix, and it's ridiculously overpriced at around $740.
We think we can make a GPIB-USBTMC interface that is:
- 100% free and open source, hardware and firmware/software
- 100% standards-compliant
- Considerably cheaper than anything else out there (less than $50)
In addition, since we'd be making essentially a "server-side" i.e. USB device-side implementation of the USBTMC protocol, this code would be reusable in projects such as Das Oszi.
Hardware design
- Using an ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller would get us:
- Built-in USB
- Plenty of horsepower to handle the throughput a GPIB device will reasonably need
- Many different implementations to choose from, and many inexpensive development boards
- Can start with an existing development board + GPIB connector
- Voltage levels on GPIB pins is "negative logic with standard TTL levels": true <= 0.8V, false >= 2.0V. (to be verified)
Software
Due to the long history of the IEEE-488 and SCPI standards, there are many devices out there supporting some earlier version of the protocol, and these will typically support commands that are vendor-specific, and syntax that is not compliant IEEE-488. Therefore supporting various device-specific or vendor-specific "quirks" will likely be a big part of real-world use-cases.
Components
GPIB connectors
- Right-angle PCB mounted male connector at Digikey
GPIB protocol chips
(pretty much all of them are no longer available)
GPIB transceiver chips
Resources
- Massimiliano Gentile's thesis on writing a USBTMC driver for the AVR32 architecture.
- Hack a Day: GPIB connectivity twofer (covers Galvant GPIBUSB and Sven Pauli's RS232-GPIB interface)