41–48 of 48 posts
I wish AVR DU series had any sort of open source support, we could finally move on from 32U4. https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microcontrollers/8-...
I cut my teeth on IEE-488. I didn’t realize that it was still a thing.
I finished my Master's a couple years ago, and in our IC probing lab, it was almost all GPIB. All of the pieces of test equipment, except for a single cutting-edge Keysight scope (which used Ethernet instead), were connected together via those chunky but satisfying and robust cables, usually controlled via MATLAB or some other IC measurement software package.
I cut my teeth on IEE-488. I didn’t realize that it was still a thing.
I've worked places where the paperwork to hook something up via Ethernet drove us to use GPIB or RS485 for everything.
Ooooo, and it supports secondary addressing? NONE of the low-cost interfaces support secondary addressing! (At least last time I looked around!) That's a big deal for those of us with R&S CMU200's / CRTU's, which require secondary addressing to make it act like a spec-an with tracking generator. And I see that in your list of tested equipment! Fantastic. And the price of prebuilt units is super reasonable. I'm in.
If you control your application stack, you can pivot from expensive NI GPIB hardware to something cheaper. Besides prices, you get the advantage of not requiring a 1.5GB Windows-only NI MAX install on a PC just to connect to the device. Since I hadn't heard of open source hardware, I bought 5 of these [0] instead around 2020 and they've been reliable for daily lab use. You just connect to them over TCP and send a cou…
A good way around application overloaded applocation stacks is R&S Visa which is lean and mean while still exposing full visa to applocations like labview. Or going with something like python usbtmc. If you also have other instruments to control e.g. with usb or ethernet you'll likely anyway look into a visa.
Actually world would need an open source visa stack. Right now you find many applications doing their own thing, but then not supporting vxi11, hislip or usbtmc. Visa is something which solved that problem for years already but the most standard package NI Visa is overloaded and scaring people away. For that reason I propagate the usefulness of R&S Visa a lot. Lean and mean, supporting all OS and procotocols as it is supposed to be.
I cut my teeth on IEE-488. I didn’t realize that it was still a thing.
Linux mainline kernel just had support for GPIB added. https://hackaday.com/2025/12/16/after-decades-linux-finally-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here a comparison from a user: https://github.com/xyphro/UsbGpib/discussions/47
Ooh! The faster speeds would be very welcome, I was bothered by the slowness of the AR488 but I assumed that was just how GPIB was (I had no baseline to compare to). I'll switch over when I get a chance. That user's project also looks very interesting - My TDS684A's CRT seems to have died, and rather than fix it I could switch to using a software scope.
FWIW I'm working on a buzzword compliant stack for ARM MCUs interleaved with writing some HALs for Embassy. It'll be interesting to see how it compares. While I'm waiting on a replacement Chinese clone I decided to order a few more boards (Atmel, NXP, Renesas, STM), level shifters, transceivers, and whatnot from DigiKey to play around with.
I wish AVR DU series had any sort of open source support, we could finally move on from 32U4. https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microcontrollers/8-...
The step to go to ARM or risc v based controllers is easy. That's what I did with V3. Gives a tremendous performance boost and costs 1/2 of that old AVR.