Programming Guidelines for Instrument Drivers
This section contains general procedures and guidelines for creating IVI drivers. If you write instrument drivers for general distribution, these guidelines help ensure that the driver behaves correctly, has a standard look and feel, and works on multiple platforms and operating systems.
The first part of This section describes how to use the Instrument Driver Development Wizard to generate instrument driver files. When you use the wizard with the built-in, predefined instrument driver templates, the wizard generates files in which most of the instrument driver design decisions have already been made and much of the coding has already been done for you.
This section also describes how to customize the driver for your particular instrument once you have generated the skeleton driver from the template. Each section shows you how to handle some common situations that you might encounter. The guidelines are well-suited for GPIB, VXI, and RS-232 instruments; however, you can apply this information to instruments that use other I/O interfaces.
The remainder of This section describes many of the details for developing instrument drivers, such as defining driver functions, attributes, and range tables.