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Remote Operation
Summary for Experienced GPIB Programmers
If you don't need an explicit response from the instrument, the *WAI command
will cause the instrument to finish processing all prior commands before con-
tinuing.
Maximum query rate
If you are waiting for a bit in a status byte, avoid writing a tight loop that con-
tinuously queries the instrument. This causes the instrument firmware to
spend an excessive amount of time responding to your queries rather than
running the instrument. Do not query the instrument more than once every
5 ms. For Visual Basic and Visual C, use the sleep command to put 5 ms delay
in your query loop. For posix compliant platforms, use the nanosleep() function
to delay the loop. For HP Basic for Windows, use WAIT 0.005.
Watching for error messages
Whenever an error occurs, it appears briefly on the instrument display and is
added to the error queue. Whenever there are messages in the error queue, bit
2 of the status byte is set. The recommended practice is to use serial poll to
read the status byte and then use a bitwise 'and' against the value 4 to see if
the bit is set. If it is set, you should use SYSTem:ERRor? to read all the error
messages until you get a response that begins with "+0", indicating no further
errors.
As you are developing your application, you should check the error status
every time you read from or write to the instrument.
Most commonly used commands
The most commonly used commands are listed here. For commands that are
listed twice, the first listing is the short form, the second is the long form. Most
SCPI commands have a long form that is easier to understand but takes longer
to send. The long form is listed only for your understanding and for cross ref-
erencing elsewhere in the manual. In practice, you should use the short form.
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