Design and Implementation of the Universal RS232-GPIB Interface

The purpose of this paper is to outline a universal RS232-to-GPIB interface which can enable a computer with an RS232 serial port to be a GPIB Talker or GPIB Listener and has the capable of interfacing RS232 instruments and peripherals to the GPIB. The dominating feature of the interface is that the baud rate of the serial communication can be adjusted by the user and the data flow can be controlled automatically. In this paper, the National Instruments TNT4882 and the 8051 microcontroller are used to realize the interface. This paper mainly presents the hardware architecture and software design of the RS232-GPIB interface.