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GPIB Troubleshooting Resources

NI Spy Utility

This document introduces you to NI Spy, a Win32 utility that monitors and records multiple National Instruments APIs (for example, NI-488.2 and VISA).

Overview

NI Spy monitors, records, and displays the NI-488 and NI-488.2 calls made to the GPIB driver from Win32, Win16, and DOS GPIB applications. It is a useful tool for troubleshooting errors in your application and for verifying that the communication with your GPIB instrument is correct.

Starting NI Spy

To start NI Spy, select the NI Spy item under Start»Programs»GPIB Software. When you launch NI Spy, it displays the main NI Spy window. By default, capture is off. Start capture by clicking on the blue arrow button in the NI Spy toolbar. Then, start the GPIB application that you want to monitor. NI Spy records all GPIB calls made to the GPIB driver. The figure below shows the main NI Spy window with several recorded calls.

NI Spy

Using the NI Spy Online Help

The NI Spy utility has built-in, context-sensitive online help that describes all NI Spy features. To access it, select Help from the NI Spy menu. You can also access the online help by clicking on the question mark button in the NI Spy toolbar, and then clicking on the area of the screen about which you have a question.

Locating Errors with NI Spy

All GPIB calls returned with an error are displayed in red within the main NI Spy window.

Viewing Properties for Recorded Calls

To see the detailed properties of any call recorded in the main NI Spy window, double-click on the call. The Call Properties window appears. It contains general, input, output, and buffer information. The figure below shows the Buffer tab for a device-level ibwrt call.

NI Spy

Exiting NI Spy

When you exit NI Spy, its current configuration is saved and used to configure NI Spy when you start it again. Note that unless you save the data captured in NI Spy before you exit, that information is lost.

To save the captured data, click on the red X button on the toolbar and select File»Save As to save the data in a .spy file. After you save your data, select File»Exit to exit the NI Spy utility.

Performance Considerations

NI Spy can slow down the performance of your GPIB application, and certain configurations of NI Spy have a larger impact on performance than others. For example, configuring NI Spy to record calls to an output file or to use full buffers might have a significant impact on the performance of both your application and your system. For this reason, use NI Spy only while you are debugging your application or in situations where performance is not critical.


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