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Getting Started 2
Agilent 6000 Series Oscilloscopes Programmer’s Quick Start Guide 19
Opening the Oscilloscope Connection via the IO Library
PC controllers communicate with the oscilloscope by sending and receiving
messages over a remote interface. Once you have opened a connection to the
oscilloscope over the remote interface, programming instructions normally
appear as ASCII character strings embedded inside write statements of the
programing language. Read statements are used to read query responses from
the oscilloscope.
For example, when using the Agilent VISA COM library in Visual Basic (after
opening the connection to the instrument using the ResourceManager object’s
Open method), the FormattedIO488 object’s WriteString, WriteNumber,
WriteList, or WriteIEEEBlock methods are used for sending commands and
queries. After a query is sent, the response is read using the ReadString,
ReadNumber, ReadList, or ReadIEEEBlock methods.
The following Visual Basic statements open the connection and send a
command that turns on the oscilloscope’s label display.
Dim myMgr As VisaComLib.ResourceManager
Dim myScope As VisaComLib.FormattedIO488
Set myMgr = New VisaComLib.ResourceManager
Set myScope = New VisaComLib.FormattedIO488
' Open the connection to the oscilloscope. Get the VISA Address from the
' Agilent Connection Expert (installed with Agilent IO Libraries Suite).
Set myScope.IO = myMgr.Open("<VISA Address>")
' Send a command.
myScope.WriteString “:DISPLAY:LABEL ON"
The “:DISPLAY:LABEL ON” in the above example is called a program message.
Program messages are explained in more detail in the online Programmer’s
Reference.