Keithley 2231A-30-3 RS232 communication slow on reading values

[BennoG]

Hi I was writing a PC interface for various power supply's I have for easy control and easy measurements.
See animated gif (could not post mp4 files) for the layout and control.
My problem is the 2231A-30-3 responds very slow to the measurements command (350 ms or so) and you can not combine measurements for different channels as far as I know.
So now I am stuk at a horrible over 2 second update rate. Anybody has found a way around this problem ?

I have the full .mp4 attached as a .zip archive.

P.S. the sample is from a n6700B i bought from e-bay

Benno

[BennoG]

I solved the problem on the slow response (for anyone who has the same problem)
The initial problem was the 350 ms delay caused by the MEAS:VOLT? and MEAS:CURR? commands.
According the documentation you can also use this commands without the question mark, so no answer expected from the PSU.
In the mean while question and set the other channels. and when you are back at this channel you can query the MEASure result with the FETC? and FETC:CUR? commands.
With this trick I get an update rate of about 0.5 - 0.7 seconds.

If I have time will release the C# code on GitHub (after I cleaned the code from all the prototyping)

Benno

[dsekine]

Hey BennoG,
I’m having the same problem. The Keithley is taking 0.3 to 0.4 sec to respond to a single query.
Could you post your C# code to a GitHub repo? I could really use some advice on this. Too slow = not useful for my application as well.

[BennoG]

as attachment to this post.

It is a visual studio 2022 forms project including source code.

when there is no communication or wrong serial port it minimizes to system tray and shows again when there is communication.
parameters "SCPI:COM9,9600"  to use it at COM9 (default COM1 9600 baud)

Double click on the icon in system tray to make it appear without serial communication.

Benno