82164A as a controller?

[Steve Roberts]

I have an HP3468B multimeter. I want to talk to it from a PC RS232 port. Can I use the 82164A in this "backward" mode, where the 82164A acts as a controller on the loop? Or, is the 82164A designed only to let you add an RS232 device to the HP-IL loop?
Thans very much!
-Steve

[Eric Smith]

The 82164A will not act as a loop controller. If you had an IEEE-488 port on the PC, you could use an 82169A HP-IB to HP-IL interface, which is able to act as a loop controller.

[Vassilis Prevelakis]

As Eric mentioned the 82164A cannot be a loop controller. However, you can transfer values from the multimeter to your PC by having something like an HP-71B read values from the multimeter and tranfer them to the 82164A.

There may be another possibility. You can place the 3468 in TALK ONLY mode in which case it sends a value to the HP-IL bus each time it is triggered.

The manual gives an example where you can use the 82162 printer and the 3468 in a loop without a controller. The 3468 is placed in TALK ONLY mode via a switch in the back and the 82162A in LISTEN ONLY mode by pressing both PRINT and ADV while turning it on.

I am not sure however whether the 82164A can be be configured in this way. Unless someone else on this list can help, you will have to look at the manual.

**vp

Edited: 25 Mar 2006, 6:59 p.m.

[Christoph Klug]

Hi Steve,

for controlling the IL-Multimeter by PC you can use the HP-IL/PC-Interface-Card plus EMU41 or EMU71 software from Jean-Francois Garnier.

This setup works great, and EMU41 and EMU71 includes transfer (and storage) features from the meausrement data to other software applications like EXCEL.

This solution only have one diasdvantage : Your PC motherboard needs an ISA-slot for the card, but remember most today industrial PC motherboards support the (old) ISA standard...

Best regards - Christoph Klug