GPIB board products are designed to interface to a personal computer with a piece of commercial test equipment or to provide communications between two pieces of test equipment. The GPIB in GPIB board stands for General Purpose Interface Bus.

Hewlett-Packard originally developed the bus for communication between instruments from different sources and called it HP-IB. Expanding on that, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers developed the IEEE-488 standard to connect and control programmable instruments, and to provide a standard interface for communication between instruments from different sources. The interface quickly gained popularity in the computer industry. Because the interface was so versatile, the IEEE committee renamed it GPIB (General Purpose Interface Bus).

Almost any instrument can be used with a GPIB board, because the bus is simply a data transfer method, and says nothing about the function of the instrument itself, or about the form of the instrument's data. Instead the specification defines a separate component, “the interface," that can be added to the instrument. The signals passing into the interface from the GPIB board and from the instrument are defined in the IEEE-488 standard. The instrument does not have complete control over the interface. Often the bus controller tells the interface what to do. The active controller performs the bus control functions for all the bus instruments.

Measurement Computing Corporation offers the largest selection of PC-based data acquisition and measurement products. Shop our online catalog by selecting a category above. From PCI, USB, PC/104, ISA, and PCMCIA bus boards to external systems based on USB, RS-232, RS-422, RS-485, and GPIB interfaces; Measurement Computing has everything you need for your PC-based data acquisition and control applications.