Description

Package visa wraps National Instruments VISA (Virtual Instrument Software Architecture) driver. The driver allows a client application to communicate with most instrumentation buses including GPIB, USB, Serial, and Ethernet. The Virtual Instrument Software Architecture (VISA) is a standard for configuring, programming, and troubleshooting instrumentation systems comprising GPIB, VXI, PXI, serial (RS232/RS485), Ethernet/LXI, and/or USB interfaces.

The package is low level and, for the most part, is one-to-one with the exported C functions it wraps. Clients would typically build an instrument specific driver around the package but it can also be used directly.

[NI-VISA Overview] (http://www.ni.com/white-paper/3702/en/)

Supported Platforms:

• Linux
• OS X
• Windows

Installation

Dependencies

• Go tools
• [NI-VISA] (http://www.ni.com/downloads/ni-drivers/)
• [git] (https://git-scm.com)

Usage

All functions in libvisa are accessible from the visagit package:

go get -u github.com/jpoirier/visa
go get -u github.com/jpoirier/visa/mxa
go get -u github.com/jpoirier/visa/keithley

Example

See the examples folder:

go run FindRsrc.go

Windows

Building the visa package on Windows

Additional dependencies to build the visa wrapper

• [mingw-w64] (http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/?source=recommended)

An example Windows build:

- install Go
- install the latest NI Visa drivers
- install a 64 bit GCC via mingw-w64 and put mingw-w64's bin folder in your PATH
- open a Windows shell and run> go get -d github.com/jpoirier/visa
- copy C:\Program Files\IVI Foundation\VISA\Win64\Lib_x64\msc\visa64.lib to the same folder as the visa package source files
- open a Windows shell in the visa package folder
- run> go build -o %GOPATH%/pkg/windows_amd64/github.com/jpoirier/visa.a -ldflags "-linkmode external -extldflags -static" visa.go exports.go defs.go
- cd to examples and run> go run FindRsrc.go