EEVblog Electronics Community Forum

Products => Test Equipment => Topic started by: Tony_G on February 11, 2017, 07:24:08 pm

Title: E5810A and GPIB Controller-in-charge
Post by: Tony_G on February 11, 2017, 07:24:08 pm

Hi All,

I have an E5810A that seems to not want to participate in handing over control on a "Controller-in-charge" request. I'm not sure if this is the expected behavior or if I'm doing something else wrong.

The setup is a HP 8563E connected to the E5810 and a Prologix Ethernet to GPIB adapter set to device mode. When you hit "Copy" on the SA it is supposed to send data to the "printer/plotter" device on a given HPIB address. This address is the one that the Prologix is set to.

When I do this with the Prologix connected directly to the SA as the only GPIB connection, the SA prints/plots correctly (I'm having a separate issue with the PrintCapture software). If I connect in the E5810A then the SA gives me a "Error 109 CTRLFAIL" which says that SA can't take control of the bus to print.

I'm not sure if:

• The SA is asserting a controller-in-charge request and the E5810A just doesn't play well with it, or
• The SA expects to be the System Controller, in which case it will never work because the E5810A is the system controller

My search fu is clearly poor today because I can't find anything that says whether the SA expects to be the System Controller or whether the E5810A doesn't work with Controller-in-charge requests (I can find documentation that says the Keysight 82357B doesn't respect them so it's completely possible that the E5810A also doesn't).

Any insight appreciated.

TonyG