(including instruments such as oscilloscopes, by manufacturers such as Agilent and Tektronix, amongst others).

By Steve D. Sharples, June 2006.

This is a collection of source code that will allow you to talk to ethernet- enabled instruments that use the VXI11 protocol, from Linux. This includes a wide range of instruments (including oscilloscopes, logic analysers, function generators etc) by a wide range of manufacturers (including Tektronix and Agilent to name just a couple). An interactive "send and receive" utility is included as an example.

You may want to build on to this libraries for your specific instruments - I'm currently working on libraries for talking to Agilent Infiniium scopes, and will probably do the same for Tektronix scopes too. Basically if you've got a Programmer's Reference for your instrument, and this code, you should be able to cobble something together.

This collection of code has been produced because I grew frustrated at how difficult it seemed to be to do a relatively simple task. None of the major manufacturers had any "out of the box" Linux solutions to talking to their instruments (although often I would talk to technical folks who would try their best to help). One of the solutions offered was to use something called NI VISA; parts of this are closed source, it was enormous, and I had worries about legacy issues with changing PC hardware.

Via Guy McBride at Agilent, I obtained a copy of a vxi11.x RPC file similar to the one included here (although no-one at Agilent seemed to know or care where it came from). After lots of searching on the information superhighway I located what I believe is the original source (or something like it); see the section on vxi11.x below. This source seems to have literally been written from the published VXI11 protocol. I also received from Agilent a simple example program that showed you how to use the protocol; working from this and the (open) source that uses the vxi11.x that is included here, I wrote vxi11_cmd and the user libraries.

This package consists of a user library, libvxi11, two command line utilities, vxi11_cmd and vxi11_send, and a Python wrapper for libvxi11.

To compile, run make, then and make install to install.

See library/vxi11_user.h for the functions provided by the library.

vxi11_cmd is a simple interactive utility that allows you to send commands and queries to your VXI11 enabled instrument. You will need to consult the reference manual for your device to find the appropriate commands. You could start by sending *IDN?.

vxi11_send is a simple interactive utility that allows you to send a single command to your VXI11 enabled instrument.

library/vxi11.x is covered by its own license, see the file for more details.

Fairly obvious. All programs, source, readme files etc NOT covered by any other license (e.g. vxi11.x, which is covered by its own open source license) are covered by the GNU GPL version 2 or later.

These programs are free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

These programs are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

The author's email address is steve.no.spam.sharples@nottingham.ac.uk (you can work it out!)