Arduino UNO as a USB to GPIB adapter / controller

NOTE:
This version is OBSOLETE!! Please go to this post for the 6.1 release software and documentation.
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Version 1 of this project is aimed to provide a cheap and quick GPIB solution to those that need to gain control over a single instrument and interact with it (e.g. to calibrate instruments that can be calibrated by GPIB only -- 6632A Power Supply being a good example).

I supposed that cheap adapters were available on the market to interface GPIB instruments with a PC. I was wrong. The only feasible solution is to go with a Prologix USB to GPIB converter, still it would have cost me some tens of bucks.
Other solutions required buying or building hardware.

On the other end I had an Arduino UNO floating around on my bench waiting for a problem to solve other than blinking leds or writing "hello world" on an LCD..

So I decided to face the challenge of writing down a c++ program and have the Arduino play the adapter role I was looking for.
To make a long story short.. (I supposed that GPIB was simple at least as much RS-232 is, .. and it is not! I was wrong again!) after reading a lot of IEEE-488 documentation and giving a try to a similar program I found over the internet, I got a decent implementation of a GPIB controller out of my Arduino UNO. This post is dedicated to describe the project.