Section Two Installation and Configuration©National Instruments Corp. 2-11 GPIB-PC User ManualDevice Map Concepts and Terms• Device Name - contains up to seven characters. The rules fornaming devices are the same as DOS rules for naming files,except that suffixes (.xxx) are not allowed. DOS treatsuppercase and lowercase letters identically. The string"PLOTTER" is treated the same as the string "plotter". Forthis reason, the configuration program maps all lowercaseletters to uppercase.Device names must not be given the same names as files,directories, and/or subdirectories. If you name a device PLTRand your file system already contains the file PLTR.DAT or asubdirectory PLTR, a conflict results.• Access Board - all devices on the GPIB require an access boardwithin the computer. The access board is the GPIB-PCinterface board that provides the hardware link to the computer.The access board name is of the form GPIBx, where x is adigit 0 or 1 representing the appropriate GPIB board number.The access board name is not alterable.The string representing a device or board name is the firstvariable argument of the function IBFIND called at thebeginning of your application program. Refer to Sections Threeand Four for detailed explanations of IBFIND.Lower Level - Device/Board CharacteristicsThe lower level screens display the currently defined values forcharacteristics such as addressing and timeout information of a deviceor board. Instructions are available on the screen for selecting a specificfield and for modifying the current settings. The configuration settingsselected for each device and each board are a means of customizing thecommunications and other options to be used with that board or device.The settings for devices specify the characteristics to be used by theaccess board for that device when device functions are used.The settings for boards specify the characteristics to be used with eachboard when board functions are used. In the following explanations ofdevice and board characteristics, notice that some characteristics applyto both devices and boards and some apply only to boards.
