Use the National Instruments Instrument I/O Assistant to communicate with message-based instruments and graphically parse the response. For example, you can communicate with an instrument that uses a serial, Ethernet, or GPIB interface.
The Instrument I/O Assistant organizes instrument communication into ordered steps. To use the Instrument I/O Assistant, you place steps into a sequence. As you add steps to the sequence, they appear in the step sequence window. Use the view associated with a step to configure instrument I/O. Four steps are available in the Instrument I/O Assistant.
- Select Instrument—Use this step to select the instrument you want to communicate with and to configure basic instrument properties. This step appears in the step sequence window when you launch the Instrument I/O Assistant and must always be the first step in any Instrument I/O Assistant sequence.
- Query and Parse—Use this step to send a command to the instrument, read a response from the instrument, and parse the returned data.
- Write—Use this step to send a command to the instrument.
- Read and Parse—Use this step to read a response from the instrument and parse the returned data.
Once you build a sequence of steps, you then execute the sequence to communicate with the instrument. When execution completes, use the response window in the Read and Parse view and Query and Parse view to interactively parse data into tokens and assign new data types to the tokens you create.
August 2005, 370704B-01
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