[time-nuts] Low Cost GP-IB PCI card?

[Ulrich Bangert]

Hi All,

i ordered one of the here discussed USB to GPIB converters from SPARK
FUN ELECTRONICS a few days ago. The wep page tells that they are out of
stock but I received the message very soon that mine will ship on July
the 4th, so they possibly built them 'just in time'.

>I found that USB-GPIB controller. Looks like BSD and Linux are
supported.

Correct, but as the device uses an FTDI USB <-> serial chip it will no
be compatible to the BSD/Linus GPIB driver. Instead it will be
compatible to the BSD/Linux SERIAL driver. As long as you are working on
your own software this makes things even more easier. But don't expect
real GPIB driver based software to run with it.

I have some friends around me that own a impressive number of GPIB based
measurement stuff but cannot use the bus features due to not being
'programmers' or not owning systems like LABVIEW or the like. For them i
thought this converter should be ideal in case someone helps them with
the serial communication stuff. I am currently writing a Windows tool
that will enable them to formulate typical measurement tasks in a very
easy PASCAL style meta-language that translates automatically into SPARK
FUN language. The meta language will feature

1) Talking to devices

2) Handling & formatting of answer strings to make numerical results
from

3) Lots of math to compute things with

4) Time/Date routines to generate a number of different formats like MJD
and so on

5) File and console handling routines

6) Control routines like 'WaitForSRQ' or 'do soemthing 100 times' or
'wait for the start of a new minute'

If this should be of interest to anyone of the group, give me a note.

Regards

Ulrich Bangert

> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: time-nuts-bounces at febo.com 
> [mailto:time-nuts-bounces at febo.com] Im Auftrag von Glenn Powers
> Gesendet: Samstag, 8. Juli 2006 23:28
> An: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
> Betreff: [time-nuts] Low Cost GP-IB PCI card?
> 
> 
> 
> Can anyone recommend a low cost GP-IB PCI card (and cable) 
> that works  
> with FreeBSD and/or linux?
> 
> thanks,
> glenn
> 
> 
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