HP 86140A Monitoring the Instrument

Remote Operation

Monitoring the Instrument

Your programs can monitor the HP 86140 series for its operating status, including querying execution or command errors and determining whether or not measurements have been completed. Several status registers and queues are provided to accomplish these tasks as shown in Figure 4-1 on page 4-12. The status structures shown in the figure consist of condition registers, event registers, event enable registers, and, in the case of the Operation Status Structure, transition filters. For example, there exists the Standard Status Condition Register, the Standard Status Event Register, and the Standard Status Event Enable Register. Condition registers show the current condition of the status lines. Event registers show that an event has occurred. Once latched, these registers stay set until cleared. Event enable registers are masks that you can use to enable or disable the reporting of individual bits from an event register. For example, you can disable the reporting of the Sweeping bit in the Operation Status structure so that, even though it goes high in the registers, it can never set the summary bit 7 in the Status Byte high.

Querying a register always returns the value as a decimal-weighted sum of all set bits. Refer to Table 4-4 on page 4-11. For example, if the value returned was 528, this would indicate that bits 4 and 9 were set. Mask registers are set using these same values. For example, the *ESE 60 command sets bits 2 through 5 of the Standard Status Event Enable Register. Whenever any one of bits 2 through 5 of the Standard Status Event Register goes high, bit 5 of the status byte will be set.

Table 4-4. Decimal Values of Event Enable Register Bits

	Decimal		Decimal		Decimal		Decimal
Bit	Value	Bit	Value	Bit	Value	Bit	Value

0	1	4	16	8	256	12	4096
1	2	5	32	9	512	13	8192
2	4	6	64	10	1024	14	16,384
3	8	7	128	11	2048	15	32,768

4-11