Instrument Control Toolbox

Creating an Instrument Object

Instrument objects are the toolbox components you use to access your instrument. They provide a gateway to the functionality of your instrument, and allow you to control the behavior of your instrument control application. Each instrument object is associated with a specific interface standard, one instrument, and possibly additional hardware such as a GPIB or VXI controller.

To create an instrument object, you call M-file functions called object creation functions (or object constructors). These M-files are implemented using the MATLAB object-oriented programming capabilities, which are described in MATLAB Classes and Objects in the Help browser. The supported instrument objects are listed below.

Table 2-1: Instrument Object Creation Functions

Constructor	Description
gpib	Create a GPIB object.
serial	Create a serial port object.
tcpip	Create a TCP/IP object.
udp	Create a UDP object.
visa	Create a VISA-GPIB, VISA-VXI, VISA-GPIB-VXI, or VISA-serial object.

You can find out how to create an instrument object for a particular interface and adaptor with the ObjectConstructorName field of the instrhwinfo function. For example, to find out how to create a GPIB object for a National Instruments GPIB controller:

• out = instrhwinfo('gpib','ni');
  out.ObjectConstructorName
  ans =
  gpib('ni', <BID>, <PR>)
  

The constructor syntax tells you that you must supply the GPIB controller's board index and the instrument's primary address to the gpib function. For example, to create a GPIB object with board index 0 and primary address 1:

• g = gpib('ni',0,1);
  

The Instrument Control Session

Configuring Properties During Object Creation