Section 6: Introduction to SCPI commands
Series 2280 Precision DC Power Supply Reference Manual
6-4
077085503 / March 2019
If you send two query commands without reading the response from the first, and then attempt to
read the second response, you may receive some data from the first response followed by the
complete second response. To avoid this, do not send a query command without reading the
response. When you cannot avoid this situation, send a device clear before sending the second query
command.
When you query a Boolean option, the instrument returns a 0 or 1, even if you sent OFF or ON when
you originally sent the command.
SCPI parameters
The parameters of the SCPI commands are shown in angle brackets (< >). For example:
:SYSTem:BEEPer:ERRor:STATe <state>
The type of information that you can use to replace <
state
> is defined in the Usage section of the
command description. For this example, the usage is:
<state>
OFF
or
0
: Disable the beeper
ON
or
1
: Enable the beeper
For this example, you can enable the beeper by sending:
:SYSTem:BEEPer:ERRor:STATe ON
Note that you do not include the angle brackets when sending the command.
Sending strings
If you are sending a string, it must begin and end with matching quotes (either single quotes or
double quotes). If you want to include a quote character as part of the string, type it twice with no
characters in between.
A command string sent to the instrument must terminate with a
<new line>
character. The IEEE-
488.2 EOI (end-or-identify) message is interpreted as a
<new line>
character and can be used to
terminate a command string in place of a <new line> character. A
<carriage return>
followed by
a
<new line>
is also accepted. Command string termination will always reset the current SCPI
command path to the root level.
