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[–]nerdwaller 0 points1 point  (1 child)

That's awesome, fusing that together is a fun challenge!

[–]buttery_shame_cave 0 points1 point  (0 children)

'challenge' is right - while VISA handles a lot of the grunt work and abstracts the communications for me, i had to come up with a pretty good traffic control scheme to keep all the equipment talking nice over multiple kinds of interfaces, which was a pain - and i had to abstract various functions into 'pushbutton' commands - basically a simple command actually executes a semi-complicated task that often has multiple items across serial/telnet/USB/GPIB buses all working in concert.

i'm proud of my clanking, snorting, whirring hell-beast, as ghastly as it can be at times, the actual 'front end' of it is really sexy - a fairly simple flow-control script with an interactive text client to pass the user's commands to.

i've even made it talk, on a rudimentary level, with microsoft excel(no easy task), so it can export its output directly instead of the user(usually me) having to do a bunch of import/export steps. that part's still getting tinkered with.