How do I connect and use Keysight U2541 data acquisition hardware?

I have a Keysight U2541 data acquisition hardware. How do I connect and use it with Data Acquisistion Toolbox?

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

According to the link below, beginning with R2016a, the Keysight data acquisition hardware is not supported by Data Acquisition Toolbox anymore. Since the existing adapters are 32-bit only and beginning with R2016a MATLAB is no longer available on 32-bit systems:

https://www.mathworks.com/products/data-acquisition/supported/agilent.html

However, since the U2500A series supports IVI-COM, we could connect and use your hardware with the Instrument Control Toolbox.

To setup your machine, please refer to the 'Requirements to work with MATLAB section' in the link below:

https://web.archive.org/web/20151127090610/https://www.mathworks.com/help/instrument/getting-started-with-ivi-drivers.html

To be short, here are a few things you have to install:

        1. Instrument Control Toolbox

2. As mentioned in the documentation above, you need to install VISA libraries, to do that please install the “Installed Instrument Control Toolbox Support Package for Keysight IO Libraries and VISA Interface” add-on.

3. You also need to install the IVI shared components, please download the 64-bit IVI shared components in the link below:https://www.ivifoundation.org/Shared-Components/default.html#ivi-shared-components 

4. To download the IVI driver, please go to the link below, click on "download" and select the 64-bit version(Please note that Keysight only states that they have 32-bit driver, but when you click on download, there is a 64-bit option. To know whether this is intended, you might need to consult Keysight support.):https://www.keysight.com/us/en/lib/software-detail/driver/u254x-u2531a-usb-modular-simultaneous-data-acquisition-ivi-instrument-drivers-1540163.html

 

As for the workflow of manipulating your hardware through the Instrument Control Toolbox, please refer to the link below (“IVI Driver” page for Instrument Control Toolbox) for a detailed documentation of all the functions we have:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160815162543/https://www.mathworks.com/help/instrument/ivi-driver.html

To make things easier, please also refer to the examples in this page as well. For example, if we pick this example below:https://web.archive.org/web/20201019225038/https://www.mathworks.com/help/instrument/configure-output-signal-on-keysight-rf-signal-generator-using-the-ivi-c-driver.html

We could see how the functions are used to connect to hardware, fetch information, invoke functionalities and disconnect. For detailed information on the functions, please also refer to the “IVI Driver” page above.

And as for how to mimic the examples above to use your particular hardware, here are some information that might be useful:

• For this particular Keysight driver, since we know the name of the driver, you should still be able to create the MATLAB instrument driver using this command:

  makemid('AgU254x', 'AgU254x.mdd')

• When you create the device object, for the second argument, which is the hardware resource name, you could find it in the Keysight Connection Expert software, it should be under the “VISA Address” when you choose your target hardware.
• For what to pass into the functions (e.g., “get”, “set” and “invoke”), you could refer to the MDD file generated by “makemid”.
  • To be more specific. Once you open the MDD file, expand the “group”, you will see the different sub-objects under the device object. To use those objects, for example, suppose your device object is named “icd” and you want to use the “Analoginacquisition” group, you could pass in “icd.Analoginacquisition” as the first argument of the “get” or “invoke” function. As for the other arguments required by the “get” and “invoke” functions, you can just use the name of the properties or functions under this “Analoginacquisition” group. For example, to get the value of “Buffer_Size” under this group, the command should look like:

get(icd.analoginacquisition, 'Buffer_Size')