Instrument Control Toolbox™

IVI Drivers Overview

Instrument Control Toolbox Software and IVI Drivers

The Instrument Control Toolbox software can communicate with instruments using Interchangeable Virtual Instrument (IVI) drivers. The toolbox supports both IVI-C and IVI-COM drivers, provided by various instrument manufacturers.

For definitions and specifications of IVI drivers and their components, see the Web site of the IVI Foundation at http://www.ivifoundation.org.

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VISA Setup

Most IVI drivers require that VISA be installed on your system. The driver installer software might specify certain VISA or other connectivity requirements.

To determine whether your system is properly configured with the necessary version of VISA, at the MATLAB Command Window, type:

instrhwinfo visa
ans = 
    InstalledAdaptors: {'agilent'}
       JarFileVersion: 'Version 2.0 (R14)'

The cell array returned for InstalledAdaptors indicates which VISA software is installed. A 1x0 cell array indicates that no VISA is installed. Possible InstalledAdaptors values are agilent, tek, and ni.

If you need to install VISA, the software installation disk provided with your instrument might include VISA along with the instrument's IVI driver, or you might be able to download VISA from the instrument manufacturer's Web site.

An instrument driver can have other software requirements in addition to or instead of VISA. Consult the driver documentation. The installer software itself might specify these requirements.

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IVI Shared Components

Many driver elements are common to a wide variety of instruments, so are not contained in the driver itself. Instead, these elements are delivered as shared components. Sharing components keeps the drivers themselves as small and interchangeable as possible. You can use instrhwinfo to determine whether shared components are installed on your system; see Installing IVI Drivers.

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IVI Configuration Store Overview

An IVI configuration store is a configured arrangement of instrument drivers and I/O port references. For an overview of IVI configuration stores and their components, see IVI Configuration Store.

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Using IVI Drivers

IVI Drivers