It's not a clone in the nice way - like an IBM PC 'CLONE' that is legitimately licencing technology, its an illegal fake copy that screws up the industry.
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Don't support this behavior. In the long run, it discourages real companies from innovating or at minimum drives the cost up as legit business uses resources to fight off this nonsense.
... If a genuine unit was sold by agilent for, say, $175 , I would've bought that. Agilent chooses to price themselves out of the amateur/hobbyist/tinkerer market. So is it right? No. Am I more than happy to have it for $85 rather than $550, clone or not? You bet!
Where the Chinese are really being dicks is by copying products that are already consumer-priced. Fake arduinos come to mind.
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I suppose that a $50 Arduino is
affordable to hobbyists just like a $500 GPIB adapter is
affordable to corporations. But the clone costs 1/5 to 1/10 as much in both cases. Are Arduino not doing something similar to Agilent by charging a market-bearing price rather than a merely modestly profitable one?
Don't forget that Arduino is open source hardware. That means that anyone is free to copy it and build it. Maybe the
desire of the creators is to allow people to roll-their-own, but the reality for something this popular is cheap, readily available clones.
So
back on topic....
I have both the Agilent clone USB adapter and an old ISA slot based NI GPIB-TNT (in a Pentium 4, the most recent computer I could find/afford with ISA). Both work well. I primarily use them with HTA scripts, that's HTML Application. It's a Windows-only thing. For the uninitiated, briefly, an HTA is an HTML file (web page) that works just like an application program. You create the GUI with HTML and the code in VBScript or Javascript (ok, JScript to be pedantic). Both Agilent and NI have ActiveX controls available that will allow use of the GPIB interface within script code, including events/interrupts. I had to mess around a lot just to get the ActiveX stuff working, but once you have that going, if you know HTML and a scripting language, you can bang out a simple GUI application like a virtual front panel in no time.
Another quick way to bang out a simple (textual, not GUI) application is EZ-GPIB. This uses a
Python-like Pascal-like scripting language, and is rather limited really. If you just want to write a script to perform a screen capture, do a sequence of operations, or to log data for hours on end, then it works.