EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Products => Test Equipment => Topic started by: n3mmr on January 03, 2019, 09:45:39 am
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One manufacturer tech rep (or managing director or something) yesterday told me that "REST is where the whole world is going" and that SCPI is not catholic enough (i e not generally available in all programming languages).
Is he right?
REST assured that REST methods can be easily accessed from any PROGRAMMING environment, albeit a bit quaintly compared to real language APIs, but REST isn't actually functionally superior to anything, is it?
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That person probably is marketing director and probably confused SOAP and SCPI..........
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That person probably is marketing director and probably confused SOAP and SCPI..........
Agreed
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To be fair, a REST interface for test equipment would improve automation greatly. The benefit of SCPI and LXI is that it is a standard. As long as industry can standardize, a REST interface would be welcome. The ability to stream data via websockets would be good, too. Anything that rids us of NI VISA driver is a good thing.
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To be fair, a REST interface for test equipment would improve automation greatly. The benefit of SCPI and LXI is that it is a standard. As long as industry can standardize, a REST interface would be welcome. The ability to stream data via websockets would be good, too. Anything that rids us of NI VISA driver is a good thing.
Completely disagree. SCPI is simple string protocol, that can (and is) implemented with a poor little RS232, and/or anything that can carry a string.
NI VISA is crap API implementation, that is crap because if of how NI implemented it.
Pushing web server and web server protocols to every single piece of measurement equipment is equally misguided as saying that SCPI would be better replaced by JAVA....
I don't even use NI VISA most of the time. It is trivial to open socket to SCPI port and just exchange strings with it. Or I use RS232.. I have many instruments with different ports.
But even NI VISA is fantastic compared to converting it all to web crap.
How do you propose to speak with RS232, GPIB using REST?
If we need to do something we would need to provide good replacement for VISA, not mess with commands on instruments.
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Welcome to the 21st century. We have gigabit Ethernet now.
No one is going to confiscate your GPIB equipment just because an equipment manufacturer makes a new REST interface available. Hell, even the LXI interface will probably live right along side a REST interface for a good long while, just like that useless GPIB interface does on my networked bench meter. As long as there is demand for it, the manufacturers will provide it.
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