Agilent Technologies E4356A manual Prerequisites for Remote Programming, External Documents

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Remote Programming

Prerequisites for Remote Programming

This organization of this guide assumes that you know or can learn the following information:

1.How to program in your controller language (Agilent BASIC, QUICKBASIC, C, etc.).

2.The basics of the GPIB (IEEE 488).

3.How to program I/O statements for an IEEE 488 bus instrument. From a programming aspect, the power supply is simply a bus instrument.

4.How to format ASCII statements within you I/O programming statements. SCPI commands are nothing more than ASCII data strings incorporated within those I/O statements.

5.The basic operating principles of the power supply as explained in “Chapter 5 – Front Panel Operation” of the Operating Guide.

6.How to set the GPIB address of the power supply. This cannot be done remotely, but only from the unit’s front panel (see Chapter 5 – "Setting the GPIB Address”).

External Documents

SCPI References

The following documents will assist you with programming in SCPI:

∙Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments Volume 1, Syntax and Style

∙Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments Volume 2, Command References

∙Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments Volume 3, Data Interchange Format

∙Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments Volume 4, Instrument Classes

To obtain a copy of the above documents, contact: Fred Bode, Executive Director, SCPI Consortium, 8380 Hercules Drive, Suite P3, Ls Mesa, CA 91942, USA

GPIB References

The most important GPIB documents are your controller programming manuals - Agilent BASIC, GPIB Command Library for MS DOS, etc. Refer to these for all non-SCPI commands (for example: Local Lockout).

The following are two formal documents concerning the GPIB interface:

∙ANSI/IEEE Std. 488.1-1987 IEEE Standard Digital Interface for Programmable Instrumentation. Defines the technical details of the GPIB interface. While much of the information is beyond the need of most programmers, it can serve to clarify terms used in this guide and in related documents.

∙ANSI/IEEE Std. 488.2-1987 IEEE Standard Codes, Formats, Protocols, and Common Commands. Recommended as a reference only if you intend to do fairly sophisticated programming. Helpful for finding precise definitions of certain types of SCPI message formats, data types, or common commands.

The above two documents are available from the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), 345 East 47th Street, New York, NY 10017, USA. The WEB address is www.ieee.org.

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