Comment by elevation
2 months ago
If you control your application stack, you can pivot from expensive NI GPIB hardware to something cheaper. Besides prices, you get the advantage of not requiring a 1.5GB Windows-only NI MAX install on a PC just to connect to the device.
Since I hadn't heard of open source hardware, I bought 5 of these [0] instead around 2020 and they've been reliable for daily lab use. You just connect to them over TCP and send a couple of commands to select the GPIB addr to correspond with; after that, you can send SCPI commands the same way you always do.
A good way around application overloaded applocation stacks is R&S Visa which is lean and mean while still exposing full visa to applocations like labview. Or going with something like python usbtmc. If you also have other instruments to control e.g. with usb or ethernet you'll likely anyway look into a visa.
Works even well on Mac and Raspberry PI btw :-)
Actually world would need an open source visa stack. Right now you find many applications doing their own thing, but then not supporting vxi11, hislip or usbtmc. Visa is something which solved that problem for years already but the most standard package NI Visa is overloaded and scaring people away. For that reason I propagate the usefulness of R&S Visa a lot. Lean and mean, supporting all OS and procotocols as it is supposed to be.