The Instrument Control toolkit must be installed and then loaded to be used.
It can be installed in GNU Octave directly from octave-forge, or can be installed in an off-line mode via a downloaded tarball.
The toolkit must be then be loaded once per each GNU Octave session in order to use its functionality.
For GPIB support (Linux only), linux-gpib must be installed before installing instrument-control. GPIB support is also available for windows by following the information from the wiki: https://wiki.octave.org/Instrument_control_package#Requirements
For VXI11 support, rpcgen, and libtirpc-devel must be installed before installing instrument-control.
For MODBUS support, the libmodbus-devel must be installed before installing instrument-control.
If using the GNU Octave installer in Windows, the toolkit will have already been installed, and does not need to be re-installed unless a newer version is available.
Run the following command to verify if the toolkit is available:
pkg list instrument-control
With an internet connection available, toolkit can be installed from octave-forge using the following command within GNU Octave:
pkg install -forge instrument-control
The latest released version of the toolkit will be downloaded, compiled and installed.
With the toolkit package already downloaded, and in the current directory when running GNU Octave, the package can be installed using the following command within GNU Octave:
pkg install instrument-control-0.9.4.tar.gz
Regardless of the method of installing the toolkit, in order to use its functions, the toolkit must be loaded using the pkg load command:
pkg load instrument-control
The toolkit must be loaded on each GNU Octave session.