THM1176/TFM1186 Use
r’s Manual
v 2.0 r 1.0
– 02/20
Copyright © 2020 Metrolab Technology SA
www.metrolab.com
19
PROGRAMMING THE THM1176/TFM1186
5-
USB Interface
5-1 GENERAL
The THM1176 family of instruments communicates with a computer host via a
Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface. If you use one of the recommended
approaches for computer control, described in the preceding chapter, you
generally don’t have to understand the details of this interface. For completeness,
however, this chapter describes the lowest level of the communication.
The THM1176 family was originally designed to plug-and-play with a Virtual
Instrument Software Architecture (VISA) compliant software library
– in particular,
the NI-VISA library from National Instruments (see
). If you are
not using NI-VISA, you will probably need information that is not provided in this
chapter:
•
USB 2.0
See “Universal Serial Bus Specification, Revision 2.0, April 27, 2000”
http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/usb20_docs/
•
USBTMC and USBTMC-USB488
See “Universal Serial Bus Test and Measurement Class Specification
(USBTMC), Revision 1.0, April 14, 2003” and “Universal Serial Bus Test
and Measurement Class, Subclass USB488 Specification (USBTMC-
USB488), Revision 1.0, April 14, 2003,” available from
http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/devclass_docs/
•
SCPI
See “Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments (SCPI),
VERSION 1999.0, M
ay, 1999,” available from
http://www.ivifoundation.org/specifications/default.aspx
•
IEEE 488.2
See “IEEE Standard Codes, Formats, Protocols, and Common Commands
for Use With IEEE Std 488.1-1987, IEEE Standard Digital Interface for
Programmable Instrumentation, IEEE Std 488.2-
1992,” available from