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Preface
TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 3 - Component-Based Measurement Systems
3Component-Based Measurement SystemsThe development of component technology brings a great revolution to the fields of automated test and measurement. It accelerates the integration of measurement systems and promotes instruments' standardization, modularization, and generalization. Graphical measurement platform is one of the most important applications in automation arena, and it provides users with an intuitive and friendly programming environment. Instrument components development is the key part of such graphical measurement platforms. This chapter explains on how to make full use of the advantages of objected orientation methodology to develop the visual instrument components for a graphical measurement platform. 3.1 INTRODUCTION The concept of the virtual instrument (VIs) [8, 9] was introduced to industrial systems at the beginning of 1990s, and it is now widely applied in various fields of industrial productions such as test and measurement, process control and factory automation, machine monitoring and control, and many others. It accelerates the standardization, modularization, and generalization of measurement systems. Graphical programming platform is the kernel of virtual instrument technology, and it provides users with an intuitive and friendly programming environment. The main goal of the graphical programming platform is to provide a user-friendly support to implement and execute the industrial tasks such as measurement, control, test, monitoring, and so on. Among the commercially available graphical programming software nowadays, Lab VIEW and HP-VEE are the representative products [4, 7]. In graphical programming languages, data and operations are represented by components and they can be connected by data flow [1], Therefore, the Visual Component Library (VCL) is the key part of such graphical programming platforms. The aim of this chapter is to address this issue in detail. Compared to traditional hardware-based instruments, the key feature of VIs is its convenience and user-friendliness provided by the graphical programming environment, which presents a clear, intuitive, and logical overview of the inner working mechanism of the entire program by linking block diagrams according to the data flow. Therefore, people who are not familiar with the traditional text-based programming languages such as C/C++, Basic, and Pascal can build their applications efficiently by assembling icons. For this purpose, a graphical programming platform has been designed and implemented using Borland Delphi/Visual C++. An important aspect of this research is the development of a powerful yet easy-to-use VCL for this platform by employing the Object Orientation (OO) methodology, which is detailed in the chapter. |
