uccjcm@uncecs.edu (John McLendon) (03/22/90)
I have a customer that would like to use Apollo workstations for instrument
control. Does anyone have any experience with GPIB (IEEE 488) interfaces
for Apollo? (2000/3000 series) Does the National Instruments PC2A or PC3
work? Are there any interfaces with real device drivers (open, close,
read, write, ioctl calls)? How is the performance (data transfer rates)?
Do they support EOI, DMA transfers, interface locking, timeouts,
triggers (GET), secondary addressing, serial poll (SPOLL), etc?
Please email... I will summarize if enough interest
John...
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(919) 941-5730 (play) gatech/ananth@METROPOLIS.MIT.EDU (Ananth Annapragada) (03/22/90)
John McLendon writes:
Does anyone have any experience with GPIB (IEEE 488) interfaces
for Apollo? (2000/3000 series) Does the National Instruments PC2A or PC3
work?
Since the 3000's and up have the AT bus, shouldnt one be able to plug in
any IEEE488 card for the IBM/AT and proceed?
Incidentally, I know that Perkin Elmer uses Apollo's to control some of their
ESCA spectrometers, and I remember seeing a GPIB bus in the setup. You might
try calling them....
Ananth Annapragada
Ananth@metropolis.mit.edukrowitz%richter@UMIX.CC.UMICH.EDU (David Krowitz) (03/23/90)
I've used a National Instruments PC2 (or 2A?) card to interface a color page scanner to a DN3000 and DN3500. The GPIO device drive library they provided (written in C) compiled and linked with no problems and seemed to work for my purposes. They do not supply an IOS manager (ie. Unix or AEGIS streams). It would be almost impossible to write one as every GPIB device I have come across requires a different sequence of GPIB commands. I did use DMA transfers with EOI and managed to get on the order of 200,000 bytes/sec when reading data from the scanner. I can't really address the other issues, as I didn't get that deep into their GPIO device driver code. I just stuck with using the interface routines in the library they provided. One nice feature was that they provided a little interactive program which I could use to issue GPIB commands from the keyboard. It was not very fancy, but it allowed me to figure out the correct handshaking sequence for the various scanner models without having to write code based on a mere guess as to what the scanner manufacturer's manual *really* meant to say. -- David Krowitz krowitz@richter.mit.edu (18.83.0.109) krowitz%richter.mit.edu@eddie.mit.edu krowitz%richter.mit.edu@mitvma.bitnet (in order of decreasing preference)