Specifications
9
IVI Drivers are available from your hardware or software vendor’s web site or by
linking to them from the IVI Foundation web site.
To see the list of drivers registered with the IVI Foundation, go to
http://www.ivifoundation.org
.
Familiarizing Yourself with the Driver
Although the examples in
Getting Started with IVI Drivers
use a DMM driver, you
will likely
employ a variety of IVI drivers
to develop test programs. To jumpstart
that task, you’ll want to familiarize yourself quickly with drivers you haven’t used
before. Most ADEs provide a way to explore IVI drivers to learn their functionality.
In each IVI guide, where applicable, we add a note explaining how to view the
available functions. In addition, browsing an IVI driver’s help file often proves an
excellent way to learn its functionality.
Examples
As we noted above, each guide in the
Getting Started with IVI Drivers
series
shows you how to use an IVI driver to write and run a program that performs a
simple measurement on a simulated instrument and returns the result. The
examples demonstrate common steps using IVI drivers.
Where practical, every
example includes the steps listed below:
•
Download and Install the IVI driver– covered in the Download and Install IVI
Drivers section above.
•
Determine the VISA address string – Examples in
Getting Started with IVI
Drivers
use the simulate mode, so we chose the address string
GPIB0::23::INSTR,
often shown as GPIB::23. If you need to determine the
VISA address string for your instrument and the ADE does not provide it
automatically, use an IO application, such as National Instruments
Measurement and Automation Explorer (MAX) or Agilent Connection Expert.
•
Reference the driver or load driver files –
For the examples in this guide, the
driver is the IVI-COM/IVI-C Version 1.2.2.0 for 34401A, October 2008
(from Agilent Technologies)
…
or the
Agilent 34401A IVI-C driver,
Version 4.4, July 2010 (from National Instruments).
•
Create an instance of the driver in ADEs that use COM – For the examples in
the IVI guides, the driver is the
Agilent 34401A (IVI-COM) or HP 34401 (IVI-C)
.
•
Write the program:
•
Initialize the instrument – Initialize is required when using any IVI driver.
Initialize establishes a communication link with the instrument and must
be called before the program can do anything with the instrument. We set
reset to
true
, ID query to
false
, and simulate to
true
.
Setting reset to true tells the driver to initially reset the instrument.