Virtual Instrument Standard Architecture (VISA) is a standard defined by Keysight™ (formerly Agilent Technologies®) and National Instruments® for communicating with instruments regardless of the interface. The VISA standard was formerly maintained by the VXIplug&play Systems Alliance and is now maintained by the IVI Foundation.
Instrument Control Toolbox™ supports the TCP/IP (using VXI11 and HiSLIP), TCP/IP Socket, USB, GPIB, Serial, VXI, and PXI interfaces using the VISA standard. Communication is established through a VISA instrument object, which you create in the MATLAB® workspace. For example, a VISA-GPIB object allows you to use the VISA standard to communicate with an instrument that possesses a GPIB interface.
For the full VISA specifications maintained by the IVI Foundation, see IVI Specifications.
VISA is supported on these platforms:
macOS (NI-VISA and R&S VISA only)
Windows® 10
These are the minimum VISA driver versions you must have:
Keysight IO Libraries version 18.1.24715.0 (Keysight Connection Expert 2019)
National Instruments NI-VISA version 19.5
Rohde & Schwarz R&S VISA version 5.12
Tektronix® TekVISA is not supported for the visadev
interface.
For many VISA applications, you can communicate with your instrument without detailed knowledge of how the interface works.
See a list of VISA resources available to connect to using visadevlist. This function provides a list of resource names and
aliases. You can also find a device's resource name or alias from your VISA vendor's
control software. For more information about the VISA resource name, see ResourceName.
To connect to a VISA resource, specify its resource name or alias using visadev.
After you connect to your instrument or device, you can configure its properties.
For a full list of visadev properties and information about how
to configure them, see visadev Properties.
Use the following functions to communicate with the visadev
object.
read | Read data from VISA resource |
readline | Read line of ASCII string data from VISA resource |
readbinblock | Read one binblock of data from VISA resource |
write | Write data to VISA resource |
writeline | Write line of ASCII data to VISA resource |
writebinblock | Write one binblock of data to VISA resource |
writeread | Write command to VISA resource and read response |
configureTerminator | Set terminator for ASCII string communication with VISA resource |
configureCallback | Set callback function and trigger condition for communication with VISA resource |
flush | Clear buffers for communication with VISA resource |
visastatus | Check status of VISA resource |
visatrigger | Send trigger message to GPIB or VXI instruments |
setDTR | Set serial DTR pin |
setRTS | Set serial RTS pin |
getpinstatus | Get serial pin status |