The GPIB Toolbox for Scilab

An open-source alternative to VEE, Labview and Matlab


Presentation

Here is a GPIB toolbox for Scilab. This toolbox enables communications between VISA for Windows (either Agilent or National Instrument) or Linux (NI-VISA) and Scilab in order to control your instruments with the serial port or the GPIB bus.
The GPIB toolbox includes several drivers (written in scilab script) for RF and microwave instrumentation :

Microwave CW Source :
HP 8657B, 8350A, 8340A, 8375A, 8372A, 8672A
Wiltron 6747B, 68137B
Anritsu 68347B, 69067B, 69047B
IFR 3414

Oscilloscopes :
Tektronix TDS familly

Arbitrary Waveform Generator :
Tektronix AWG 520, 2021

DC power supplies :
HP 3455A, 6003x Agilent GW PPT-1830, 66000A

Powermeters :
HP Anritsu

Step Attenuator :
Agilent


Current version :
Linux : 0.9d (September 2005)
Windows 1.43 (September 2009)

This toolbox implies you have installed VISA on your system before. Linux version 0.9d was tested on Mandriva Linux 10.1 with NI-VISA. The latest version was not tested because I changed my linux distro and NI488 do not support the latest kernel version. Nevertheless you can compile the latest windows version on your linux system if NI-VISA runs correctly.



Example

// Drive a RF source located at GPIB adress #11 with language #2 (i.e. Anritsu source)
// Please read the help file in the toolbox to check the language number...
// Fréquency : 2 GHz
GPIB_set_source_freq(11,2,2*10^9)

// Power : 0 dBm
GPIB_set_source_power(11,2,0)

// Output : ON
GPIB_set_source_output(11,2,1)




Download and installation

1. Download the archive file for Windows (here) or Linux (here)
2. Unzip the file in your Scilab contrib directory (SCI+\contrib)
3. Install the Toolbox : exec(SCI+'/contrib/GPIB/builder.sce')
4. Now, the GPIB toolbox can be loaded from the Scilab Toolbox menu.



Documents

Guide de la GPIB ToolBox This document (in french) written by Julien Coudrat from Thales explain how to build the toolbox with a free C compiler (Dev C++ and MingWin).

GPIB ToolBox This document (in english) written by Stepan Potocky explain how to re-build the toolbox with a free C compiler (Dev C++ and MingWin) and how to drive USB instruments.