Communicating with Instruments from MATLAB using VISA

MATLAB and Simulink support the VISA standard through Instrument Control Toolbox. You can use MATLAB software to control instruments, make measurements, analyze data, and build test systems. Once data is in MATLAB, you can analyze and visualize that data for tasks such as signal processing, statistical analysis, digital filtering, and curve fitting.

VISA is a standard for configuring and programming test systems. The toolbox enables you to work with one or more of the following VISA interfaces directly from MATLAB or Simulink:

• GPIB
• GPIB-VXI
• Serial
• TCP/IP
• USB
• VXI

Supported VISA Software

Instrument Control Toolbox supports VISA software from many manufacturers, shown below.

Manufacturer	Minimum Driver Requirements
Agilent Technologies	Agilent I/O Libraries version M.01.01.04
National Instruments	NI-VISA version 3.0
Rohde & Schwarz	NI-VISA version 3.0
Tektronix	Tektronix VISA version 3.3

See the list of VISA driver limitations.

Resources

• Capturing a Waveform from an Agilent Oscilloscope over VISA interface (Code example)

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