Agilent Technologies E1439 manual Programming

Using the Agilent E1439

Programming the Agilent E1439

C programming

The E1439 is shipped with a source library of C-functions that can be called from user programs. This elevates the interface above the register level so the programmer does not have to be concerned with such things as register addresses and packing or splitting parameters into 16-bit register lengths. The library includes ANSI compliant source code files with all machine dependent code constrained to a single source file. By re-writing selected portions of the machine.h file, the programmer can create and compile an E1439 library that is compatible with virtually any development environment using the C language. The most common reason for re- writing machine.h is to accommodate I/O libraries other than VISA. In some cases, the library may need merely to be re-compiled to target a different processor type for the host computer.

Porting the E1439 library to a different computer environment is likely to be a fairly straight forward task. However, some of the higher level tools shipped with the E1439 may not be as easily ported. The interactive soft front panel and some example programs include human interfaces that depend on certain display and keyboard support which may be system dependent. Although source code is included for these applications, porting them to a different environment may present a greater problem than porting the library itself. The installation utilities are specifically targeted to operate on the supported development environments and may not be available in other environments.

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