Has anyone seen the below error before? Does anyone have any ideas on how to

Question

go about troubleshooting it? I am using a PCI-GPIB card on a WIN95 machine in an attempt to communicate with an
ESP300 Universal Motion Controller ver 3.03. which reponds to ASCII commands.
As a basic first step (using LabVIEW 6.0.2) I first attempted the example on p.20-6
of the LabVIEW ver 6 Measurements Manual. I passed the string "*IDN?".
I get the following error from the Simple Error Handler:
Error -1073807339 occurred at VISA Write in esp300_scott1_mod4.vi
Possible Reasons:
VISA: (Hex 0xBFFF0015) Timeout expired before operation completed
In a second attempt I tried using LabVIEW version 5 with the example on 8-12 of the
User Manual, here I g
et the same error from the Simple Error Handler:
Error -1073807339 occurred at VISA Write in esp300_scott1_mod4_ver5.vi
Possible Reasons:
VISA: (Hex 0xBFFF0015) Timeout expired before operation completed
N.B.--> I have successfully used NI's Measurement and Automation Wizard to communicate
with the instrument. When I pass the string *IDN? I get the response:
ESP300 Version 3.03

Answer 1

Your best VISA troubleshooting utility is the VISA Interactive Control (nivisaic.exe). From this utility, you can use the VISA protocol to communicate with each of the VISA resources available on you system. If you are unable to get this utility to properly recognize or use your NI-GPIB card, It may be suggested to uninstall/reinstall the NI-VISA distribution. If you can get the utility to work then there is a programmatic problem which you must address. Debugging programmatic issues is best troubleshot using the VISAIC utility, NI-SPY (nispy.exe), and highlight execution. If you can outline a flow from within VISAIC, using NI-SPY you can log this flow and attempt to emulate it from within LabVIEW. Make sure each of the functions has the proper inputs. Also, try usin
g some of the VISA/GPIB examples shipped with LabVIEW.
Ryan Mosley