Accelerate instrument control and automation

Automating instrument set-up and measurement within a programming environment can be difficult. The instrument commands and programming languages are different, and do not always integrate well. Instruments may have hundreds if not thousands of commands and knowing all of the correct parameters and what is possible for each instrument can be very time consuming and tedious. A new free programming tool from Agilent Technologies (Command Expert) bridges the gap between the computer programming language and the instrument commands accelerating the automation process. 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. Instrument commands 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. The command sequence once developed and tuned 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.