GPIB - General Purpose Interface Bus

GPIB (General Purpose Interface Bus) is a communication interface between diferents devices, as USB, serial port, parallel port, etc....

The National Instrument$ and Angilent ($$$) support this interface (developing drivers and aplications), this is the first and problably the last post that I do about anything that use proprietary software, I want only show that is possible use free software in this type of situation.

So, the GPIB was developed by cientists, for your devices, and they earn rates about 5MB/s (yes, 5 Mega Bytes). Few time later the IEEE maked the standard IEEE-488.

This standard is very commom is devices of materials analysis, radio-frequency, etc.... those are used in "down engeneering".

But the Scilab has a toolbox for GPIB systems (here) and it works on GNU/Linux (if the toolbox doesn't work on GNU/Linux I don't make this post)!

About the GPIB:

• Supports until 32 devices simultaneously;
• In a GPIB network exists 3 types of elements: talkers, listeners and controllers;
• Each device can be acessed and controlled individually.

For GNU/Linux developers, exists free libraries for GPIB developing to C/C++ and Python languages.

I'm having sucess with Scilab and GPIB.

Finishing: we don't need use MetLab or LambVIEW or any proprietary software (they smell badly!).