Galvant Industries GPIBUSB

Galvant Industries GPIBUSB is the perfect way for you to easily connect your test and measurement gear featuring GPIB/HPIB connectivity ports to your computer.

About

Many pieces of test & measurement equipment feature a connectivity port labelled “GPIB” which stands for General Purpose Interface Bus. On some equipment this can also be labelled as “HPIB” after the company that originally invented it.

Commercial USB to GPIB adapters contain a lot of features and functionality, but are also very expensive ($500+ new). This is well out of price range for most hobbyists, as well as plenty of engineers and scientists. A lot of people don’t need all of the advanced GPIB communication functionality; some are just looking to download multimeter readings or oscilloscope waveforms to their PC. This project aims to implement as much GPIB communication functionality as possible, while still remaining accessible.

Another limitation of your typical USB to GPIB adapter is the development environment restriction due to the required drivers. For example, these vendors only provide Linux drivers for Red Hat-based distributions, but these drivers do not include MATLAB bindings! Instead of having to deal with all sorts of GPIB and VISA driver stuff, this GPIBUSB adapter presents itself to the attached PC as a serial port, allowing a wide variety of operating systems and development environments to utilize it. So although this means that this adapter is NOT a drop in replacement for conventional ones, this flexibility is desired by many.

Firmware

All boards ship with firmware v5 installed. All hardware rev4 boards can be upgraded without any special tools. This firmware version features numerous improvements such as support for the Prologix command set, SRQ support, serial polling, a FIFO buffer (from the PC to adapter), improved data termination handling, and much more.

Features

• Open source! All source can be found at github.com/Galvant
• Cross platform – works on Windows, Linux, and OSX
• Cross language – works with any programming language able to connect to serial ports
• Connect your instruments to your PC via USB
• GPIB bus driver ICs (new in rev3!)
• Compatibility with nearly all Prologix commands
• Serial poll SRQ support
• Device mode support (new feature in firmware v5)
• USB-B connector
• Includes pre-written Python classes for easy communication with instruments found at github.com/Galvant/InstrumentKit
• Upgradeable firmware – Useful to add new features and bug fixes easily
• Assembled in Canada and PCB manufactured in USA
• Powered from PC (no extra power supply required)
• Reset switch
• Assembled with lead-free solder

The documentation that is included with the adapter can be found at github.com/Galvant/gpibusb-documentation while some additional notes can be found in the README.md file at github.com/Galvant/gpibusb-firmware