Clay A Bean

59648929, Oct 12, 1999

Aug 29, 1997

8/920479

Tieming Tang - Austin TX
Clay Bean - Austin TX

National Instruments Corp. - Austin TX

G06F 1130

714 38

A software monitor utility is disclosed which capture and displays General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB) calls made to GPIB driver software in real time. The GPIB driver software controls a GPIB interface. The GPIB interface is coupled to one or more GPIB instruments. The monitor utility is configured to record and display both the start and end time of a GPIB operation, where end time is the time control is returned to the GPIB application. In addition, for asynchronous GPIB calls, the monitor utility records and displays the end time of the corresponding asynchronous operation. Also, the monitor utility provides the option of substituting a monitor-enabled version of a key driver module for a non-enabled version upon entrance to the utility. Furthermore, an option of provided for restoration of the non-monitor-enabled version upon exit from the utility.

59745410, Oct 26, 1999

Jul 22, 1997

8/898050

Mike Hall - Round Rock TX
Clay Bean - Austin TX

National Instruments Corporation - Austin TX

G06F 1900
G05B 2302

712228

A GPIB system which includes asynchronous event notification. The GPIB application first provides a notify request to GPIB driver level software, preferably an ibnotify call or a GPIB Notify OLE control. The notify request includes a unit descriptor which uniquely identifies the GPIB device, event information regarding a plurality of GPIB events to monitor, a reference to a callback function in the GPIB application, and user defined reference data for the callback function. In response to the notify request, the GPIB driver level software begins monitoring events specified by the event information. When an event occurs which is being monitored, the GPIB driver level software recognizes the event and invokes the callback function. The invocation of the callback function is performed asynchronously to the GPIB application. The callback function may include one or more calls to one or more functions in the GPIB driver software.

59580283, Sep 28, 1999

Jul 22, 1997

8/898051

Clay Bean - Austin TX
Mike Hall - Round Rock TX

National Instruments Corporation - Austin TX

G06F 1314

710 62

A system and method which enables a plurality of threads in a multithreaded application to each access per-thread copies of GPIB global variables in a GPIB system. According to the present invention, the plurality of threads use a special set of thread-local GPIB calls to perform the per-thread accesses. Whenever a thread first makes a GPIB call, the GPIB driver software begins maintaining a private copy of all of the GPIB global variables for the respective thread. The driver preferably maintains a separate private copy for each thread. Later, when the thread desires to access a per-thread copy of one or more global variables, the thread uses a thread-local GPIB call to perform the per-thread access. The thread-local functions used to access these per-thread GPIB global variables are ThreadIbsta, ThreadIberr, ThreadIbcnt, and ThreadIbcntl. When the GPIB driver level software receives a call to a thread-local function to access a per-thread global variable, the software determines the appropriate value for the respective thread and returns the per-thread value to the respective requesting thread.