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