Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Keep those legacy GPIB cards or upgrade?
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?
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