I've developed a system for automating processing of in-situ vacuum pumps in infrared detector dewars. The systems have been in use for several years and I'm in the middle of an upgrade and I was wondering if I can link the systems together to increase my process throughput. Each system is in a portable rack and rolls up to a vacuum oven where the process takes place. I'm getting pressure readings from an ionization gauge controller using GPIB. I have 4 systems total and I would like to try to link two together so that I can process twice as many units at a time on the same vacuum oven. Currently each system has one GPIB interface and all have the default GPIB address of 0. I know I can give each system's GPIB interface a unique address (0,1,2,3) but I'm not sure how to pass control between systems. Ideally I would hook up both systems to the GPIB, trigger one of the systems to search the GPIB using the Find Listeners VI to determine the other controllers address, and then pass control to one of the systems. I'm assuming I can't do this since both systems are initially controllers and this would screw up communication on the GPIB. These are utilized in a high throughput production environment by unskilled operators, so whatever I do would have to be fairly automatic. These guys can press a button to link the system, but I can't have them configuring the GPIB interface to transition to this mode. Any suggestions?
