Specifications

6
Installation instructions for IVI drivers
IVI drivers provided by a manufacturer are the easiest way to interface with the
instrument hardware also provided by that manufacturer. Agilent Technologies
provides IVI drivers for all instruments that have GPIB and/or USB interface
capability. Please see the individual instrument webpage linked from the
Agilent Technologies website.
There are three steps to installing an IVI driver. The first two steps, installing
VISA I/O and installing IVI Shared Components, are only necessary if you
haven’t previously installed these software items.
Step 1: Installing a VISA library for low-level hardware I/O
Agilent Technologies IVI drivers all use the low-level Virtual Instrument Software
Architecture (VISA) libraries for communicating with devices over GPIB, USB,
and a variety of other buses. VISA libraries from any company will work, but we
recommend the NI VISA library or the Agilent IO Library Suite.
Skip this step if you already have a VISA library installed on your computer.
You probably have VISA installed if you have installed software from National
Instruments or Agilent Technologies to connect to an instrument using a LAN
(Ethernet), USB, GPIB, or VXI bus.
National Instruments, who provides the ubiquitous LabVIEW software, also
sells hardware devices for connecting USB ports to GPIB ports (GPIB-USB-HS),
PCI cards that connect to GPIB ports (PCI-GPIB) or ethernet-enabled GPIB host
controllers (GPIB-ENET/100). If you are using a NI product to connect your
computer to your instrument, use the NI VISA library.
Agilent Technologies, who offers a competing visual programming language
called VEE, also offers a VISA library package wrapped around their free IO
Library Suite. If you are using Agilent products to connect your computer to your
instrument, you might want to use the Agilent VISA library.
For a simple USB cable connection from your computer to the instrument, you
can use the NI 488.2 VISA libraries. The following instructions are specific to
the NI-488.2 VISA libraries.
1.1 Download and un-zip the software package
You can download the NI VISA libraries directly from the NI webpage. Find
and download the latest version of the NI VISA 488.2 software. Make sure you
download the version designed for your operating system and in your native
language.
Alternatively, Agilent Technologies hosts a mirror of version 2.5 (from September
2008). This version works just fine and is hosted on our website, the filename
is ni488225.exe, and it is linked from each product page. The file is 259 MB and
takes a while to download.
After downloading, run the self-extracting file. You may be presented with a
security warning message. If you feel it is prudent to continue, unzip the contents
into a directory. This is temporary and you can delete it later.