Programming Support

Dear sir,

While running the Spike software from the laptop,can we send SCPI commands from the third party application (e.g., Keysight IO Libraries or NI LabVIEW) to the instrument parallely for getting the required information from the device.

Yes you can. In general only one application can have a SCPI connection to Spike at a time. Any application that can communicate SCPI commands via the VISA SOCKET protocol can communicate with Spike.

We use IO libraries internally for testing, using the interactive IO panel. We have heard of customers using the SCPI capabilities in MATLAB and LabVIEW with Spike.

[Steve Barba]

Is it possible to send SCPI commands & queries to the device WITHOUT Spike up and running? Specifically, I’d like to be able to install a driver, then use PyVisa (Python) to communicate with the USB-SA44B as I do with other devices.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by Steve Barba.

Hi Steve,

If you want to use SCPI, then yes Spike has to be running. Spike has a hidden mode, which can be activated by launching it from the command line with a special flag. The Spike user manual details this.

If you want a true headless interface, you could use the API’s which are located in our SDK. The headless APIs support only basic data acquisition such as sweeps and I/Q data. Any additional processing or operations such as markers or channel power, or etc, would need to be performed in your application.

Let me know if you have follow up questions.

In fact, we are using the API even though that limits us and is trickier to configure for our software automation. PyVisa & SCPI works smoothly on other devices. We’ll use a different company’s spectrum analyzer for future projects. Thanks for the information.

[Author]

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