Interactive Control of VISA

NI-VISA comes with a utility called VISA Interactive Control (VISAIC) on Windows and Linux. This utility gives you access to all VISA functionality interactively in an easy-to-use graphical environment. It is a convenient starting point for program development and learning about VISA.

Note  To launch VISAIC on Windows, select Start»National Instruments»VISA»VISA Interactive Control.
Note  On Linux, VISAIC is called NIvisaic.

When VISAIC runs, it automatically finds all of the available resources in the system and lists the instrument descriptors for each of these resources under the appropriate resource type. This information is displayed in the Devices listbox .

The following figure shows the VISAIC window.

VISAIC Window

The Resource to Open control in VISAIC is a string control for using VISA expressions to find specific instruments. Refer to viFindRsrc for information about creating custom expressions. You also can select a resource from the Devices listbox to populate the Resource to Open string control.

Double-clicking on any of the instrument descriptors shown in the VISAIC window opens a session to that instrument. Opening a session to the instrument launches a window with a series of tabs for interactively running VISA commands. You also can click the Open VISA Test Panel button in Measurement & Automation Explorer (MAX) to open a session to the instrument.

When a session to a resource is opened interactively, a window similar to the following appears.

The VISAIC Test Panel includes the following pages: