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SCPI skips on
November 27, 2006

In this second of an occasional series on editorials from Personal Engineering & Instrumentation News, I look at the instrumentation programming language known as Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments (SCPI). The link below opens a pdf of the original editorial.

In August 1996, PEIN associate editor Mike Porter asked "Is SCPI really obsolete" where he heard from instrument vendors that VXIplug&play drivers would put SCPI out of business. Porter questioned that prediction, and he was right. Ten years later, SCPI lives on. Porter pointed out that not every instrument has a driver and that drivers often don't provide access to every instrument feature. Thus, engineers still write commands directly to instruments.

Recently, a discussion of SCPI came up on the Agilent Vee e-mail user group. One participant talked about how he and others prefer to write SCPI commands directly to an instrument rather than through a driver because writing SCPI commands to an instrument is, as he put it, "easy and no additional software installations are needed." Another participant concurred, saying "I think there are a lot of test engineers who aren't programmers at all, but know how to get Vee (or LabView or Rocky Mountain Basic) to send a SCPI command to an instrument and get a response."

How do you control instruments? Through SCPI commands, DLLs, VXIplug&play drivers, IVI drivers, or some combination? Post a comment.

Posted by Martin Rowe on November 27, 2006 | Comments (0)