Virtual Instrument Software Architecture (VISA)
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I have a question. In the labs we have lots of equipment. Many of them are work with VISA. I know Tektronics has theirs, National Instruments has their version too. There are also VISA libraries so you can interface with equipment.
Has anyone had much experience with any of this? I've gotten no where with trying to figure out how to do it. Everything so far, has been a program that does stuff for you. I want to do write a custom program.
I'm just the type of person that loves to automate everything even though doing it manually can be faster (in total time) and easier. Its the experience with making machines do what I want them too. I'm just wondering if anyone has anything experience or know where I can find some worthwhile information. Vendors have mostly what I call techno-babble rather than technical information.
-Thanks
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I don't understand how it would be unrelated? There are C++ VISA libraries, and Qt is a cross platform GUI framework. You will need a GUI for setups and displaying graphs. Not to mention Qt programs could run also run on the actual equipment. Most equipment I play around with is a computer and talks over the Ethernet. Isn't this just a very specific use of Qt?
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I would say it's tangentially related to Qt only if you chose to use it as your interface. I think the main reason that Volker moved it is because -- while you could use Qt with the libraries -- your question is more geared toward the use of the VISA libraries. Since that could be done with or without Qt, it's not directly Qt-related.
With that being said, though, I imagine that if one had a good grasp of using the VISA libraries, then it wouldn't be a big issue to deal with Qt on the front end or for handling data or networking or any of the other things that Qt does well (bearing in mind that Qt is so more than just a GUI framework.)
I would suggest that if you're new to both the VISA libraries and also with Qt, you focus on learning each of them individually rather than try to tackle both learning curves at the same time.
Not sure what kind of technical information you're looking for, nor what the difference between information and babble is :) Seems kind of subjective.
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Just seems like we are splitting hairs on what general means. I'm just interested if anyone uses Qt in this fashion, and if they do how? It seems like Qt would be perfect for such a task. There are other ways to use VISA, but I'm not interested in those.
When I refer to techno babble, I"m referring to what some people call the mathematician's answer. Technically correct but otherwise worthless. Microsoft has lots of documentation like that. (not saying they are the only ones) Their best practices for security on older system, is useless information but its still correct.
I think I might ask this question a different way in the C++ gurus programming. Since you are right you don't need Qt to use the libraries, but I'm not for sure what other free tools are out there. I don't like wxWidgets, tutorials are a pain to use.