Senior Technical Editor Martin Rowe covers topics relating to general-purpose instrumentation, compliance, communications test, and anything else that comes along.
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Blog
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Keep those legacy GPIB cards or upgrade?
Jun 23 2009 8:44AM | Permalink |Comments (3) |
A recent discussion on the Agilent Vee e-mail user group highlights a common problem that test engineers face: equipment obsolesence. An engineer has test systems based on old computers that use ISA-GPIB cards while others use PCI-GPIB cards. His systems run Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, and XP. Some software is written in Vee, but some is in C++ and Pascal. Should he look for PCs with ISA slots so he can keep running his existing GPIB cards and software or upgrade to all PCI-GPIB cards or perhaps go to USB-GPIB adapters? Obviously, he'd prefer not to have to write new software, but staying with existing equipment and code makes things more difficult should he need future system compatibility. It's the age-old tradeoff between backward and forward compatibility.
Have you faced a similar problem with GPIB or data-acquisition cards? What have you done about it?
Related entries in: GPIB/IEEE 488 | Instrument Interfaces | PCI | USB |
Reader Comments
at 7/7/2009 3:59:18 PM, rob j. said:
damn, sounds like my job.
and i was hoping someone was going to post the answer.
at 7/10/2009 6:16:58 AM, Rich D said:
When our company upgraded our computers that had ISA-GPIB cards. I bought USB-GPIB and don't regret it. When a test computer crashed I plugged the USB-GPIB into another computer and have production running again within the hour.
at 7/29/2009 5:51:41 PM, Usenet said:
Great idea, but will this work over the long run?
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