Communicating with Your Instrument
Each GPIB instrument has a specific set of commands that you use to program it. The commands are always transferred over the GPIB by the Controller, but the exact command sequences are totally dependent on the particular GPIB instrument. Your GPIB instrument came with documentation that describes the command sequences that you must use to get it to work properly. Refer to that documentation to determine how to communicate correctly with your GPIB instrument.
For simple instrument communication, use the NI-488.2 Communicator. For more information, refer to the Using NI-488.2 Communicator topic.
Before you begin writing your application, you might want to use the Interactive Control utility to communicate with your instruments interactively by typing in commands from the keyboard rather than from an application. You can use it to learn to communicate with your instruments using the NI-488.2 API. For more information, refer to the Interactive Control Overview topic.
To start Interactive Control within Measurement & Automation Explorer, select Tools»NI-488.2»Interactive Control or click on the following button.
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