Accelerate instrument control and automation

Automating instrument set up and measurement within a programming environment can be difficult. This paper will demonstrate the details of creating a sequence of instrument commands that will perform the necessary set-up and measurement and will assure the correct syntax and options for later integration into an automated environment. Agilent´s Command Expert will be used to generate the instrument commands that can be profiled to improve execution time and identify bottlenecks. Different instruments can be substituted, and the software will identify commands that need to be altered or will not work for the new instrument. Once developed and tuned, the command sequence can easily be used in the following Application Development Environments (ADEs): Visual Studio, LabVIEW, MATLAB, VEE, SystemVue, and Excel. These and other features help remove many of the barriers that exist today when trying to automate instrument control for validation and test.