Re: GPIB bus topology

On 5/2/2024 3:52 PM, bitrex wrote:

What are you planning on using in the host (PC) to talk to the instruments?

 Hoping to use SciPy/Numpy with a National Instruments GPIB-USB dongle on a Linux machine.

Be sure the dongle is on the end of a USB cable and not supported
by the USB port on the host!

There's a wonderful tech-surplus warehouse of the old fashion in the Boston area, they sell the USB interfaces at $50 and 1 meter L-com/Belkin/assorted brand GPIB cables at $10 a pop

Like Hefrons'?
I get most of my rescues as freebies from discards that aren't
"mass marketable" (e.g., not many mainstream folks want 50 pound
servers, SAS drives/cables, PoE switches, etc.) so have only "scrap"
value (e.g., 10c/pound for a computer; 21c/pound for a VRLA battery;
etc.).
As a result, I have a shitload of boxes full of assorted cables:
SCSI1, SCSI1-SCSI2, SCSI2-VHDCI, SunSCSI, Apple SCSI, USB2/3/c,
25pin parallel, DB9 serial, eSATA, CAT5/6, 13W3, composite video,
..
Many years ago I discarded the GPIB cables as "too bulky for
the functionality they provide" and moved to GPIB-over-enet.
I can leave test equipment piled out of the way until needed
and then just poke a patch cord into the GPIB adapter and be
up and running.
My only (partial) regret was discarding all the 10Base2 stuff
as it was *so* much easier to route a shitload of hosts than
the star topology used by *BaseT.  Yeah, I could never have lived
with the 1MB/s transfer speed but the hassle of having to run
individual drops to each piece of kit is REALLY annoying...
especially when you want to rearrange stuff!  SWMBO has a cartoon
of some guy crawling around under a bench amidst a tangle of
wires... with my initials written above him!
(My body is way too old for this sort of shit)