3 ms·
I love these power supplies! An awesome feature is the GPIB port on the back (it's basically a parallel port with a specific command set). In college I bought
by tn1 5y ago
I love these power supplies! An awesome feature is the GPIB port on the back (it's basically a parallel port with a specific command set).
In college I bought a USB to GPIB adapter on ebay for like $100 and a few cables (you can daisy chain them together) and wrote some VBA macros to automatically sweep the voltage output over a range, and also connected to a frequency generator & oscilloscope to capture the data. My EE labs were done in a fraction of the time compared to my classmates!
- the_only_law 5y agoI have a ton of old HP/Agilent equipment for my current project and most of it has GPIB connectivity. It seems like a neat protocol and I also finally got an HP-85 with the serial/GPIB modules which have been on my wishlist for a while. Might try to turn it into a controller for some of the equipment.
- bartvk 5y agoThe protocol isn't too bad but that humongous connector... hoo boy. I think everyone nowadays just hooks it up with those USB-to-GPIB connectors, but the drivers under Linux are often iffy: if you get the wrong one, you need to supply a blob to it, in order to fully boot.
- the_only_law 5y agoI have so many V.35 cables laying around the GPIB feels small.
- tverbeure 5y agoYeah, one of the reasons to buy this PSU was the GPIB interface. I already had the expensive ($100+) USB to GPIB interface anyway. Earlier, I wrote a blog post about controlling my TDS 420 oscilloscope through GPIB: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2020/06/27/Tektronix-TDS420A-Remote-Control-over-GPIB.html https://tomverbeure.github.io/2020/06/27/Tektronix-TDS420A-R....
- Mauricebranagh 5y agoGPIB was also how commodore PETs used to hook up their disk drives