Package: libgpib-perl (3.2.09-2) [universe]

libgpib perl bindings

The Linux GPIB Package is a support package for GPIB (IEEE 488) hardware. The package contains kernel driver modules, and a C user-space library with Guile, Perl, PHP, Python and TCL bindings. The API of the C library is intended to be compatible with National Instrument's GPIB library.

The General Purpose Instrumentation Bus (GPIB) is a short-range digital communications cable standard connecting electronic test and measurement devices to control devices. Developed by HP in 1970 (and then called HP-IB) it has been standardized in 1978 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers as the IEEE Standard Digital Interface for Programmable Instrumentation, IEEE-488-1978 (now 488.1).

IEEE-488 allows up to 15 intelligent devices to share a single bus by daisy-chaining, with the slowest device participating in the control and data transfer handshakes to determine the speed of the transaction. The maximum data rate is about one megabit per second. Paraphrasing the 1989 HP Test & Measurement Catalog: HP-IB has a party-line structure wherein all devices on the bus are connected in parallel. The 16 signal lines within the passive interconnecting HP-IB cable are grouped into three clusters according to their functions: Data Bus, Data Byte Transfer.

To use these packages you have be using a 2.6 kernel, install gpib-modules-source, compile a gpib-modules-KVERS package out of it, install that and libgpib0 as well a libgpib-bin. Documentation and headers are contained in libgpib0-dev. Language bindings for python, perl and php are available in separate packages as well. This package contains the bindings for perl.