HP Sander 16500C manual Introduction

Introduction

Status reporting allows you to use information about the instrument in your programs, so that you have better control of the measurement process. For example, you can use status reporting to determine when a measurement is complete, thus controlling your program, so that it does not get ahead of the instrument. This chapter describes the status registers, status bytes and status bits defined by IEEE

488.2and discusses how they are implemented in the HP 16500C Logic Analysis System. Also in this chapter is a sample set of steps you might use to perform a serial poll over HP-IB.

The status reporting features available over the bus are the serial and parallel polls. IEEE 488.2 defines data structures, commands, and common bit definitions. There are also instrument-defined structures and bits.

The bits in the status byte act as summary bits for the data structures residing behind them. In the case of queues, the summary bit is set if the queue is not empty. For registers, the summary bit is set if any enabled bit in the event register is set. The events are enabled via the corresponding event enable register. Events captured by an event register remain set until the register is read or cleared. Registers are read with their associated commands. The *CLS command clears all event registers and all queues except the output queue. If *CLS is sent immediately following a program message terminator, the output queue will also be cleared.

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