Hello, and welcome to Connecting Instruments to BenchVue.
In this tutorial, I m going to go over how to connect your instruments on your Bench
remotely to the BenchVue software remotely using GPIB, LAN, USB or RS232.
If we refer to the bottom of the screen to what we call the instrument panel, you can
see I already have one instrument connected to BenchVue.
And that is a DMM connected over GPIB.
Now, I know it s connected because I can see the green checkmark.
When you first open up BenchVue, any USB or GPIB instruments that you have connected to
your PC will automatically be detected and added to the instrument panel, so they re
ready to use.
Also, if I add a GPIB or USB instrument to my computer after BenchVue has already been
powered up, I can easily add them to the instrument panel by pressing the refresh button.
So I just plugged in a scope over USB, and I can hit the refresh button and we see the
oscilloscope show up.
So now I m connected to a DMM and an oscilloscope.
Now for LAN and RS232, to add them to BenchVue, we need to use a visa configurator, which
I ll demonstrate.
And once we do that, in the future when we open up BenchVue again, they will automatically
show up on our instrument panel as long as they re connected to the computer.
So let me demonstrate that.
If I go over to this IO icon, I can open up a visa configurator on my computer.
Now when I press on it, I actually have two choices because I have two different visa
configurators on my PC, Agilent Connection Expert or National Instruments Measurement
and Automation Explorer.
Now, either one will work.
I happen to have both, you just need one.
So I can select which one.
Now, if you don t have any on your computer, when you installed BenchVue, it would have
detected that you didn t have one, it would have prompted you and automatically installed
Agilent Connection Expert.
So here, I m going to open up Agilent Connection Expert, and what I m going to do is add two
LAN interface instruments to my visa configurator and then BenchVue will then connect to those
instruments and I ll see them on my instrument panel.
So if we go into the visa configurator, or Agilent Connection Expert, we can see my different
interfaces on my PC.
Here under USB, we can see the scope that I m connected to, we can see the DMM I m connected
to under GPIB, and then if I go up to LAN, if I want to add an instrument to my LAN interface,
I can right click there and select add an instrument, or I can use this button up here,
same thing.
And what this does is it automatically searches my local subnet to see what LAN instruments
it detects.
Now, it detects a signal analyzer and a function generator.
It looks like we see multiple instruments because it can use different protocols to
connect to those instruments.
So, a signal analyzer, there s three different choices, for the function generator there
s two choices.
I m going to select the LXI interface for the function generator, and I m not going
to add the signal analyzer this way.
I m going to show you a different way to add the signal analyzer.
So I press okay.
I now am connected through my visa configurator, I now have the function generator added.
If I want to add the signal analyzer, let s say that I have a very long list of instruments
that are connected over LAN.
I don t want to scroll through them, so I want to add it manually.
So I m going to click add by address.
I can use the host name, or I can use the IP address.
The IP address I can obtain from the instrument s front panel.
So I m going to type it in for the signal analyzer, I m going to identify the instruments,
and there it is, and then I m going to press okay.
And now I have both my function generator and signal analyzer configured in my Agilent
Connection Expert.
I want to close that, then I m going to hit my refresh button on BenchVue, and there we
see our LAN connected instrument.
If I go into the quad view, I can now activate the Bench application for each instrument.
So now, not only am I connected, I m actually going to be able to monitor and control these
instruments.
Okay, and let s get a screenshot from the scope, let s start a data log with the DMM
and let s get a trace from the spectrum analyzer.
Now, notice that my instruments now show an up arrow showing that not only is BenchVue
connected to them, but BenchVue is actually using them or interfacing with them to get
measurement data.
If I right click on one of these instruments, I can get information about its connection,
I can get its firmware, I can get its address.
I can also refresh the instrument.
If I shut down one of my Bench apps, let s say the function generator.
Let s say I have too many instruments on my instrument panel, I want to hide some.
You can see when I shut down my Bench app, it goes from the up arrow to the green checkmark,
and I can right click here and just click hide, and it will remove it from my instrument
panel and puts it in this area where there s an instrument icon.
So if I wanted to, I could then bring it back later if I wanted to.
Okay, that s all for this tutorial, for more information on the BenchVue capabilities or
for an overview of how to use BenchVue, I encourage you to check out the tutorial Getting
started with BenchVue.
Thanks for listening.