Instrument Control Toolbox™ 2.6

Product Description

• Introduction and Key Features
• Working with the Instrument Control Toolbox
• Managing Your Instrument Control Session
• Developing and Modifying Instrument Drivers
• Supported Devices, Instruments, and Protocols

Working with the Instrument Control Toolbox

The Instrument Control Toolbox provides a variety of ways to communicate with instruments, including:

• Instrument drivers
• Communication protocols
• Graphical user interface (TMTool)
• Simulink Blocks

The Instrument Control Toolbox is based on MATLAB object technology. The toolbox includes functions for creating objects that contain properties related to your instrument and to your instrument control session.

Instrument Drivers

Instrument drivers let you communicate with an instrument independent of device protocol. As a result, you can use common MATLAB terminology to communicate with instruments without learning instrument-specific commands, such as Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments (SCPI).

The toolbox lets you work with VXIplug&play, IVI, and MATLAB instrument drivers. VXIplug&play and IVI instrument drivers often ship with your instrument and are also available from the instrument manufacturers’ Web sites. You can also create MATLAB instrument drivers with driver development tools provided in the Instrument Control Toolbox.

Communication Protocols

The Instrument Control Toolbox supports communication protocols, including GPIB, serial, TCP/IP, and UDP, for directly communicating with instruments. You can also communicate with instruments using VISA over GPIB, VXI, USB, TCP/IP, and serial buses. The toolbox provides a set of M-file functions for creating and working with instruments. These functions let you write commands to your instrument or read data from your instrument for use in MATLAB. The toolbox supports the text commands used by your instrument, such as SCPI. The transferred data can be binary or ASCII.

TMTool

You can communicate with and configure your instruments without writing code using TMTool, a GUI that enables programmers and nonprogrammers to:

• Search for available hardware
• Connect to an instrument
• Configure instrument settings
• Write data to an instrument
• Read data from an instrument

TMTool automatically generates M-code from your instrument control session. By saving this code to an M-file, you can execute the same commands programmatically.

Simulink Blocks

The Instrument Control Toolbox also includes instrument control blocks for use with Simulink. Blocks are provided for sending live data from your Simulink model to an instrument, and for querying an instrument to receive live data into your model. Dialog boxes facilitate hardware selection and configuration for use in Simulink models.

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