Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

[email protected] (Ned Arnold) · Wed, 18 Jun 1997 09:12:07 -0500

> Hello everybody,
> 
> I am trying to set-up a GPIB link using the NI-1014-1 VME card. My IOC is
> a Motorola MVME147 and my EPICS release is R3.12.2. After configuring the
> obvious things as base address and others and "play" a lot with the GPIB 
driver
> in order to produce printouts that can help to solve our problems, we have not
> gone any further. We are using the generic GPIB record to communicate with
> our multimeter (a Keithley 2010) to start with. We get the following output
> messages:

Josep,

   We use NI1014's alot here at APS. I looked over your error messages and the
   ones that appears VERY suspicious are the following ...

       interrupt: GPIB error interrupt generated on link 0
       DMAC error initialization on link 0.

   These errors indicate that the NI1014 is getting an error when it attempts
   a DMA operation (it uses DMA to retrieve commands and return results to the
   CPU). 

   This could be a simple problem like not installing the NI1014 properly. As
   a DMA and an interrupting module, it must be installed with NO EMPTY slots
   between the CPU and the 1014 (unless the backplane is appropriately
   jumpered). If this is not done, the 1014 will not be able to successfully
   obtain the VME bus to do the DMA.

   NOW FOR THE BAD NEWS ...

   If the 1014 was installed properly, then its not a simple problem. When we
   were porting EPICS to the MVME167, John Winans had to patch the
   board support package (BSP) to make A24 address space available to DMA
   devices. It seems likely that the MVME147 BSP would require a similar patch.
   Since John is no longer around, you may have to plead with the greater
   EPICS community for someone who has done this for the MVME147.

   I would like to point out a handy utility (probably undocumented) that
   is distributed with EPICS for testing GPIB devices.  In base/src/devOpt is
   a utility called devGpibInteract.c . When this compiled, loaded into the 
   ioc, and started with the command 'GI' , it provides an interactive, menu
   driven utility for sending and receiving messages to GPIB devices. It talks
   directly to the driver, so no special records are required. You may want to
   use this to minimize the "unknowns" until your problem is resolved.

   	Hope this helps,

   		Ned

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System