Using VISA alias to fake the instrument address or interface

A colleague asked me about the virtual instrument concept this morning. His team would like to create a virtual instrument as most of the time they have to write software while the instrument is not ready. So, I showed him the simple Virtual Instrument that I created.

He basically likes the idea, however, he has concern on this tools which is using the LAN Socket interface. This is because most of their application is using other interfaces like USB or GPIB. So, here comes the solution -> Using Visa alias to fake the instrument address or interface.

The magic of cheating a software on a non-exist resource string is to use the Alias. Lets say the Virtual Instrument loaded a simulated instrument at port 5000, the resource string is: "TCPIP0::localhost::5000::SOCKET". If we need to make the virtual instrument to have a GPIB or USB address, we can create an alias:

1. Open the Agilent Connection Expert (ACE)
2. Under the LAN(Tcpip0) node, find the virtual instrument.
3. Right click on the virtual instrument, select "Add VISA alias"
4. Enter the Visa Alias, such as
   USB: USB0::1234::5678::US12345678
   GPIB: GPIB0::6::INSTR

The alias added should be shown under the instrument, as indicated in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Alias appear under the virtual instrument

After this, we can connect to the fake GPIB and USB address just like regular instrument. Figure 2 shows the virtual instrument can be connected with various interface addresses.

Figure 2: Connect to the same instrument with different addresses

Related Topic:

• Virtual Instrument with Agilent VEE