Technical data

20 Programmer’s Guide

3 Status Registers

Overview

When you are programming the instrument you may need to monitor

instrument status to check for error conditions or monitor changes. You

need to determine the state of certain instrument events/conditions by

programming the status register system.

IEEE common commands (those beginning with *) access the

higher-level summary registers. To access the information from specific

registers you would use the STATus commands. The STATus subsystem

remote commands set and query the status hardware registers. This

system of registers monitors various events and conditions in the

instrument. Software written to control the instrument may need to

monitor some of these events and conditions.

What are Status Registers

The status system contains multiple registers that are arranged in a

hierarchical order. The lower-level status registers propagate their data

to the higher-level registers in the data structures by means of summary

bits. The status byte register is at the top of the hierarchy and contains

general status information for the instrument’s events and conditions.

All other individual registers are used to determine the specific events or

conditions.

Each register set is made up of five registers:

Condition

It reports the real-time state of the signals monitored by this register set.

There is no latching or buffering for a condition register.

Positive

Transition

This filter register controls which signals will set a bit in the event

condition bit changes from 0 to 1).

Negative

Transition

This filter register controls which signals will set a bit in the event

condition bit changes from 1 to 0).