Measurement Computing Personal488 rev.3.0 For DOS & Windows 3.Xi - Manual (Page 271)

10G. Utility Programs II. SOFTWARE GUIDES - 10. Driver488/W31
II-256 Personal488 User’s Manual, Rev. 3.0
Operation of the Application
Designed for simplicity, the
application has very few controls.
To begin communicating with
your instruments, you must first
create a device. When creating a
device, you can either use a
device name that you have pre-
configured or a new name. Press
the Create button, as shown in the
figure, then fill in the parameters
in the pop-up Device Window.
After a device has been created,
most of the main window controls
will be enabled. If your
instrument has data available,
pressing the Read button will
collect the data and place it in the adjacent Results window. Commands can be sent to the selected
device at any time. Simply type in the command string into the Output Data/Commands field, then
click on the Send button, or hit
.
When collecting data via the Read button, the data is placed at the destination selected in the Data
Destination field. If the destination is a file, it is usually a good idea to specify the entire path. The
example in the following figure, shows the Data Destination for Screen and file as
Test.dat . A more
complete destination for Screen and file would be C:\Test.dat .
As additional devices are created,
they will be added to the
Instruments list. No two
instruments can be created using
the same name. Only one
instrument in the Instruments list
can be selected at any one time.
All of the controls in the main
window pertain directly to the
selected instrument. For
example, after creating create two
devices, the last device created
will be selected. Now click on
the Serial Poll menu item. The
response will immediately pop-up
on the screen. Now select the
other device and repeat the Serial Poll. The response of that device will now be on the screen.
Cutting & Pasting to Other Applications
The Results field of the QUIKTEST main window supports many of the features of a standard text
editor. The cursor can be placed anywhere in the text, text can be added or deleted, and text can be
selected, cut or copied. Under the Edit Readings menu item, is the
Copy command for copying
selected text to the clipboard. Text sent the clipboard can subsequently be pasted into almost any
Windows application.
Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)
The QUIKTEST application has the ability to send collected instrument results directly to other
Windows applications via the Windows Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) capabilities.
For example, to send collected data to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet:
Creating a Device
Collecting Data