Product category:
Board-Level Instruments
News Release from: KineticSystems Company | Subject: SoftView
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 09 May 2008
Software package includes PXI/CompactPCI
range
SoftView can manage multiple instruments simultaneously, providing the ability to test a complex system of cooperating instruments.
KineticSystems has released SoftView, a tool that integrates KineticSystems' entire line of PXI/CompactPCI instruments into a single software package At the touch of a button, the user can initiate operations on the instrument such as calibration, reset, data acquisition start and stop
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 17 Sep 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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The touch of another button brings up a dialogue for configuring all of the instrument's properties, including overall sample rate, individual channel enable, filter range and input level properties.
Patrick Cassady, Executive Vice President of DynamicSignals said "SoftView not only provides immediate access to all of an instrument's capabilities and features through a simple point-and-click graphical user interface, but it also allows the user to easily construct fully integrated multi-instrument systems, with no programming required".
Once the instrument is configured, the Start button in SoftView activates data acquisition.
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The instrument is placed in run mode and the input signals from enabled channels are displayed in a real-time graph window or a numeric table.
Autonomous events are displayed as well.
With just a few simple mouse clicks, the user can explore the instrument's functions and properties, adjust filter, input range, debounce and other settings, as well as start acquisition and test the results immediately.
Digital and analogue output channels are driven by a simple expression syntax that combines discrete and continuous generation functions with arithmetic operators and conditional logic to create waveforms of arbitrary complexity.
This expression syntax can also be applied to input channels, allowing real-time scaling, offsets, change of units, polynomial curve fitting, and synthesising results from more than one channel.
Output channels can be expressed in terms of analogue or digital input values, or triggered in response to autonomous events.
SoftView can manage multiple instruments simultaneously, providing the ability to test a complex system of cooperating instruments.
Data from digital and A/D input instruments is collected, manipulated and displayed and can also be used to drive digital and analogue outputs on other instruments.
SoftView is built on two underlying software libraries: the SoftView library manages the instruments in the system, while the Stream library manages input and output data from the instruments.
In addition to controlling and querying instruments, the SoftView library provides the ability to query for the operations an instrument supports, including all of the instrument's properties, options and help texts.
The Stream library contains the expression syntax engine, as well as all of the logic to convert raw data to final engineering units and record the data to a file - it even provides the real-time graph images displayed by SoftView.
Application programming interfaces (APIs) are available for both of these libraries.
They simplify the task of putting together a custom application with capabilities of the basic SoftView package.
Third party instruments - including VXI, LXI and USB instruments - can be fully integrated under the SoftView library to create multivendor, multiplatform-based applications.
The SoftView application is included at no charge with all of KineticSystems' PXI/CompactPCI products.
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