Clairsoft TestPad Development Studio v1.00 can be used as an Instrument Control software tool within LabView. No more instrument drivers required to control any type of test instrument or UUT wich uses text message-based communication over GPIB, RS-232, TCP/IP or USB (based on the VISA-COM run-time).

TestPad gives you unique capabilities in Instrument Control in terms of that you don't need a LabView driver to control test instruments or UUTs within your LabView applications, you also don't need to write any single line of code for interface and/or instrument configuration & communication. You simply teach TestPad how to generate a sending message using provided input parameters and how to parse the device response back into a usable data format. The process of interactively defining rules for generating/parsing messages (device operations) requires no programming and in many cases no other definitions other then simply typing a sending message and selecting/marking only the data you need from the device response. As a result of interactively defining these device operations, TestPad dynamically generates(compiles) an actual “device driver” implemented as a COM server DLL which can be used via LabView's ActiveX communication functions (by adding reference to "Clairsoft Device <device_logical_name> 1.0 Type Library"). This means that an actual instrument programming model (properties and methods) will be available to you within an application. The attached picture is a screen shot of the sample LabView diagram utilizing TestPad generated device driver.

Instrument interchangability became also available via firstly, TestPad GUI-based instrument connection configuration (GPIB, Serial, TCP/IP, USB - based on VISA-COM) and secondly, redefinition of parsing rules for another instrument according to the defined COM interface. This built-in TestPad functionality gives you ability to write your LabView code irrespective of particular interface/instrument. You just specify required instrument properties & methods, and when you decide which instrument to use you interactively configure it’s instrumentation interface and parsing rules according to these properties & methods used by your application. This approach gives the highest possible Instrument Interchangeability model which is much simpler for development process and is more flexible than using LabView, VXI plug&play or IVI drivers, where you have to use the driver’s API in the code and can interchange instruments only across similar instrument models or types.

TestPad in comparison with the LabView Instrument I/O Assistant offers the following :-
- it has much more flexible message parsing definition rules based on XML Schema language;
- it generates(compiles) a driver DLL file while keeping a “source” parsing rules available for further modifications, rather then generating an unmaintable code;
- it hides all the instrumentation interface communication (behind a connection logical name) by GUI-based configuration attributes, thereby you may simply change interface, for example from GPIB to TCP-IP/Telnet, without any code modification.
- the TestPad generated instrument driver can be also used in other development environments, such as NI Measurement Studio, VC++, VB, Delphi, Tcl/Tk, MATLAB, JScript, VBScript, Perl and more (based on COM/.NET interfaces), which became especially valuable in the projects involving more languages then LabView only.
So, to sum up, TestPad offers an actual Instrument Abstraction development model.

TestPad also implements such functionality as saving test results into the database or spreadsheet file for futher processing, supporting I/O communication protocols such as Telnet over TCP/IP, instrument simulation capabilities, test data validation, tracing & logging.

You may want to download the Multimedia TestPad Product Demonstration (3 min) from http://www.clairsoft.com (TestPad v1.00 is also available for free download).

TestPad System Requirements:
- Windows 2000/XP.
- Run-time VISA-COM I/O library, such as NI VISA 3.x.

Should you have any questions regarding to the TestPad please feel free to send an email to andrei@clairsoft.com.


Sincerely,

Andrei Shirobokov
Software Architect, Clairsoft
Email: andrei@clairsoft.com
Web: http://www.clairsoft.com

Hello,

does somebody use Clairsoft TestPad ?
How are your experience ?