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The author mentions, “Watch out for HPIB-only plotters!” — I forgot to take that advice when I bought a plotter from a scrap shop a few years back and thought I was completely out of luck. Spent a fair amount of time googling, and I ended up building an HPIB-to-serial bridge using an Arduino to get life out of the machine. Works just fine now! I’ve been meaning to write up how that works in case anyone’s in a similar disposition.

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I've seen these warnings before, including from this article from when I read it before, but I'm not sure I understand the aversion of them. From what I understand, HPIB is no different than GPIB, and from what I can tell, USB GPIB controllers aren't that expensive. And controlling something serially over GPIB is really not that different from doing it over RS-232. So if the price is right on a GPIB-based one, I don't see the issue.

HPIB and GPIB are the same thing (IEEE-488 standard), and USB-GPIB interfaces are indeed available. The catch is getting software to talk to the GPIB interface drivers. There are many programs that will send arbitrary data to a virtual serial port, but not as many that can use the GPIB drives. If you're writing the software yourself, it's easy in some languages, such as Python (PyVisa works fine), but in others it might be harder.

Also, I'm not sure if the drivers for the interfaces are available for anything but Windows.

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