Communicating with Your Instrument

Interface Objects and Instrument Commands

Communicating with your instrument involves sending and receiving commands, settings, responses, and data. The level of communication depends on the type of instrument object you use.

To communicate through the interface object, you need to send instrument commands, and you receive information as the instrument sends it. Therefore, you have to know the syntax specific to the instrument itself. For example, if the instrument requires the command '*RST' to initiate its action, then that is exactly the command that must be sent to the interface object.

Text commands and binary data are sent directly to the instrument and received from the instrument with such functions as fprintf, fwrite, fgets, fread, and others.

Device Objects and Instrument Drivers

To communicate through a device object, you access object properties with the set and get commands, and you execute driver functions with the invoke command. The invoke command for a device object employs methods and arguments defined by the instrument driver. So using device objects does not require you to use instrument-specific commands and syntax.

For information on creating, editing, and importing instrument drivers, see MATLAB Instrument Driver Editor Overview.