Scott,
I'm afraid your only real solution is to return the unit. When I look
at the online specs and the manual, the 9800 series is pretty clearly
labeled for single output D/A values. I will note that in looking at
the online page, the column headings are all offset, but it is pretty
obvious if you look at the chart for more than a second and then you
see that there is no throughput entry for D/A. The short and sweet is
that you bought the wrong board.
Data Translation does make boards that do what you want, but not in
USB, you will have to use PCI or PCMCIA. I would warn you up front that
my experience with the PCMCIA cards is they either install and work
great or they don't and I don't have a way to predict which. Many
hours have been expended trying to get a card to work in 1 particular
notebook and it never worked. Data Translation help was no help in
this case. On the other hand, in another laptop and a desktop they
work great.
I've relatively little experience with the PCI cards so far (we did
ISA for many years, but they are not supported under the more recent
Windows) but they seem to be fine.
lBill
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I'm afraid your only real solution is to return the unit. When I look
at the online specs and the manual, the 9800 series is pretty clearly
labeled for single output D/A values. I will note that in looking at
the online page, the column headings are all offset, but it is pretty
obvious if you look at the chart for more than a second and then you
see that there is no throughput entry for D/A. The short and sweet is
that you bought the wrong board.
Data Translation does make boards that do what you want, but not in
USB, you will have to use PCI or PCMCIA. I would warn you up front that
my experience with the PCMCIA cards is they either install and work
great or they don't and I don't have a way to predict which. Many
hours have been expended trying to get a card to work in 1 particular
notebook and it never worked. Data Translation help was no help in
this case. On the other hand, in another laptop and a desktop they
work great.
I've relatively little experience with the PCI cards so far (we did
ISA for many years, but they are not supported under the more recent
Windows) but they seem to be fine.
lBill
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> Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 10:43:01 +0100
> From: "James Atkin" <James.Atkin@mitectelecom.biz>
> Subject: vrf - Plotting HPGL from 8753 Analyser ...
> Has anyone controlled an 8753 Analyser and forced it to take an HPGL plot
> - not to a plotter, but to a file on the controlling PC ?
>
> I am looking into it at the moment, but if anyone has successfully
> done this, I would appreciate any advise you can offer me.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> James
>
> - -------------------------------------------------------
> James Atkin BEng(Hons) AMIEE
> Software Engineer
> Mitec Telecom Ltd
> The Arenson Centre
> Arenson Way
> Dunstable
> Bedfordshire
> LU5 5UL
> - -------------------------------------------------------
My suggestion would be to use the Matlab script feature to generate
your plot (you get much more control over your plot that way
anyway). From inside the Matlab script window, you can then
use Matlab's print command to print the data to files in a variety
of formats, including HPGL. The Matlab script help window has
a fair amount of information. Also, you can go to the Mathworks
web site (www.mathworks.com) and look under their support page.
Since this feature seems less utilized than I believe it
should be, I'll include a nickel tutorial here. Skip
it if it's old hat for you ...
A simple example would be to have two inputs to a Matlab script
window, call them X and Y (case sensitive).
In the Matlab script you then type:
plot(X,Y)
which generates a line plot of X versus Y.
To control the color, you would say
plot(X,Y,'b'); % The semicolon tells Matlab not to echo the command
% The ampersand is the Matlab comment character
Now, for some axis labels use:
xlabel('This be X'); % Note single quotes for Matlab
ylabel('That be Y');
title('Hey, Mom! I got a plot!');
Finally, you can get some control over the plot characteristics, you
prepend each of these commands with a handle, i.e.
p1 = plot(X,Y,'r'); % Red line this time
set(p1,'linewidth',2); % Make the line thick
x1 = xlabel('This be X'); % Use a different handle for the xlabel
set(x1,'fontsize',14); % Default size is 12pt
set(x1,'color','g'); % Of course, you want a green x label
Note that the Matlab script box will run and then disappear. To
hold onto this plot so you can use the Matlab commands to print,
tie an "OK" block under the Matlab script block. You can then access
the file menu at the top of the Matlab plot window. Alternately,
you can put the print command right in the script with:
print -dhpgl foo
or you can have the filename be a text input to the
Matlab script box. In that case (with an input named fn)
the command:
print( gcf, '-dhpgl', fn )
Note that among the useful formats available there are EPS, PS, JPG,
and PNG files. GIF is no longer available because Matlab uses ghostview
to translate the plots into various formats and Compuserve foolishly
started trying to enforce their patent on GIF files. There are programs
which convert EPS and PS to PDF files (e.g. Acrobat Distiller).
-- Danny
________________________________________________________________
| Danny Abramovitch E-mail: danny@labs.agilent.com |
| Agilent Labs Voice: (650) 485-3806 |
| 3500 Deer Creek Rd., MS: 25U-9 FAX: (650) 485-4080 |
| Palo Alto, CA 94304-1392 |
| |
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