Instrument Control Toolbox

Configuring Communication Settings

Before you can write or read data, both the VISA-serial object and the instrument must have identical communication settings. Configuring serial port communications involves specifying values for properties that control the baud rate and the serial data format. These properties are given below.

Table 4-11: VISA-Serial Communication Properties 

Property Name	Description
BaudRate	Specify the rate at which bits are transmitted.
DataBits	Specify the number of data bits to transmit.
Parity	Specify the type of parity checking.
StopBits	Specify the number of bits used to indicate the end of a byte.
Terminator	Specify the character used to terminate commands written to the instrument.

Refer to your instrument documentation for an explanation of its supported communication settings. Note that the valid values for StopBits are 1 and 2 and the valid values for Terminator do not include CR/LF and LF/CR. These property values differ from the values supported for the serial port object.

You can display the default communication property values for the VISA-serial object vs created in Creating a VISA-Serial Object with the get function.

• get(vs,{'BaudRate','DataBits','Parity','StopBits','Terminator'}
  )
  ans = 
      [9600]    [8]    'none'    [1]    'LF'
  

The Serial Port Interface

Controlling Serial Port Instruments