Instrument Control using C# with VISA

VISA is a driver software architecture developed to unify communication with GPIB, serial, Ethernet/LAN, IEEE 1394, and USB instruments and simplify your instrument control applications. With the VISA API developers can use GPIB, serial, Ethernet/LAN, IEEE 1394, and USB instruments.

VISA offers the following benefits:

• Interface independence – VISA provides a single API with the same methods to communicate with instruments, regardless of the interface type. For example, the VISA command to send an ASCII string to a message-based instrument is the same for GPIB, serial, Ethernet/LAN, IEEE 1394, and USB interfaces.
• An object-oriented architecture that can easily adapt to new instrumentation interfaces developed in the future.
• Full-featured instrumentation programming functionality implemented in a very compact command set.

The VISA .Net API is an object-oriented interface made up of a set of .Net classes to communicate with instruments with VISA. You can use Net compliant languages such as C# and Visual Basic .Net.