Hi, okay, let me be more concise. The lab equipment has two formatting modes, ascii, and float.
In ascii mode, it returns strings that represent the numeric value, so e.g. 3.14 is returned as '3.14'. PyVisa, when set to read ascii mode, will convert these strings to float with "visa.read_values()". (easy enough to do myself too with visa.read(), split(), and eval()). In float mode, the instrument returns a sequence of bits that are exactly the ieee754 number in the case of floats, or just the flags in the case of flags. PyVisa, when set to float mode, will convert everything to float, because it is unaware apriori that one of the fields returned is actually intended to be used as binary flags. Secondarily, I had to set the instrument to return the bits in small endian for it to read properly (I could aternately set PyVisa to swap endianness for me). I may need to manipulate this. Actually now that I read the very confusing manual, it looks like maybe the flags is returned as a decimal number, but it's not clear how this is returned in either ascii or float mode. In any case, I think I will need to manipulate "native" numbers into binary representation. Looks like I should figure out the struct module... Michael -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
