A LabVIEW driver for the instrument is available from the Signal Recovery website, offering example VIs for all its controls and outputs, as well as the usual Getting Started and Utility VIs.
It also includes example soft-front panels built using these VIs, demonstrating how you can incorporate them in more complex LabVIEW programs.
What's Included?
In accordance with National Instrument's recommendations, all drivers that operate instruments via GPIB or RS232 serial interfaces use the NI VISA software extensions. The advantage of this is that they are portable to any platform supported by LabVIEW and NI VISA, not only the PC, and that it is possible to build systems using multiple instances of the same instrument. For example, two model 7265's used for ratiometric spectroscopy can be operated from the same program. Drivers for the models 3820, 3830 use an underlying ActiveX control for instrument communication, and hence will only work on computers running Windows.
Each driver includes a basic VI to handle communications to and from the instrument. This generally takes the form of a VISA Write/Read VI that will write any of the commands listed in an instrument's instruction manual to the instrument and handles the response, if any. Complex responses, such as curve downloads and responses to compound commands are decoded correctly, and the VI operates via either the RS232 or GPIB interfaces. It also generally determines the instrument's status (e.g. overload and reference lock) and makes these available as Boolean outputs.
Other basic VI's are supplied to open and close VISA sessions, to determine the instrument's status, firmware revision and perform a reset operation.
The next level of VI's support the different instrument controls and read the required outputs. These VI's are unusual since they have the capacity to save the last setting sent to the instrument so that if called repeatedly they do not generate unnecessary commands over the interface, thereby speeding up programs that use them.
At the top level the drivers include some Application Examples and a Getting Started VI. The latter operates essentially as a "static interface" routine, and is a good template to use for building your own program, while the Application Examples generally take the form of a soft front panel and show how the lower level VIs can be combined to yield a useful program.
Please feel free to contact for detailed specifications, accessories, software and options.