gpib project

[N9SXF]

hi everybody,

After some consideration on the level of, 'well, why not?' I took the plunge and decided to go down the GPIB rabbit hole. It began by mending a filter cap on the +5 volt rail on an hp3455a that fell in my lap, then finding a hp3478a to keep the other one honest. After some research on here- particularly reading about the knockoff agilents usb-gpib- I figured an ni pci-gpib (n114 on board, exact model number to follow) would be a safe bet... until i began to seriously look into software. Now I'm bewildered by the vast array of driver and os combinations and instruction sets for each particular bit of equipment.

The good news is I am learning that ko4bb, ke5fx, ulrich bangert, and even the NI ftp website (with particular thanks to precaud on here from his contribution pointing out where to find older drivers) have things comprehensively covered, assuming you've got the experience to avoid a newbie's mistakes... Which is the reason i'm here. See, my attempts to install the ni-488.2 driver version 2.5.2 on the machine stopped when it prompted for labview and a few other things. I didn't even get as far as looking over if I have GPIB32.dll installed.

Um... to add a layer of (your choice- ridiculousness, frugality, masochism, not knowing any better, or fill in the blank)...the platform for said NI pci-gpib card was originally intended to be an old linux box which happened to be the only desktop in the house with pci slots- a dell dimension 8200. This was until I found that for some reason, dell decided to build a super dock for my old latitude c840, with space for two pci cards and a storage drive expansion slot- which once I found out about it i went and found one for all for twenty bucks shipped and now the gpib card is in there without a driver.

So now my lab bench has the potential to be state of the art for...2002. For this reason, i have included links to related discussions on the AntiqueRadio forums...

At a minimum this should consolidate all the loose knowledge across very many postings here and elsewhere to help jumpstart discussion on the topic.



So to summarize, what can i use for free given the combination of winXP os and ni pci-gpib?

n9sxf

Bibliography:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/a-big-thumbs-down-to-natl-instruments/msg1793855/#msg1793855

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/gpib-getting-started/msg686062/#msg686062

http://ko4bb.com/Test_Equipment/GPIB.php

http://www.ulrich-bangert.de/html/downloads.html

ftp://ftp.ni.com/support/

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~osc22/tutorials/gpib_usb_linux.html

https://linux-gpib.sourceforge.io/

https://www.antiqueradios.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=139236

https://antiqueradios.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=324831

[WastelandTek]

gonna watch this