Generic Soft Panel And Driver Design For The Oscilloscope Class Virtual Instrument

In recent years, with the continuous development and maturity of the bus technology and electronic information technology, modularized virtual digital oscilloscope is going to the direction of integration and miniaturization, the market demand is also growing. At the same time, for the flexibility and versatility of application software also have higher requirements. By the world leader in virtual instrumentation NI lead, achieve the universal of soft panel and the interchangeable of instrument has become an important trend of virtual instrument software technology.This subject completed generic soft panel and driver design for the oscilloscope class virtual instrument, that is to say, design a generic soft panel and instrument driver for the oscilloscope modules which is based on different buses. Not only improve the normative and flexibility of the software, but also improve software reusability and maintainability, it’s easy for software designers to add or change the instrument functions according to user needs, to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse customer applications.This paper analyzed the overall workflow of the oscilloscope system, presented overall program of the generic software design. Using the XML configuration files and IviScope Class Specification, achieve the universal of soft panel and instrument driver. The main contents are as follows:1. Designing the knob control and building modular soft panel interface, whichincluding channel settings module, horizontal settings module, trigger settingsmodule, waveform display module, parameters measurement module andexpansion function modules.2. Parsing XML configuration files to achieve the dynamic update of soft panel.3. Designing the simple arbitrary waveform generator interface, for thoseoscilloscope modules which contain waveform output function.4. According to IVI-C class specification, I designed the framework of universaloscilloscope instrument driver, which include oscilloscope class driver andspecific oscilloscope module drivers.5. Completed XML file package of every oscilloscope modules, supply toapplication software for update the soft panel. 6. Completed package of the performance functions in PXI specific oscilloscopemodule drivers, to achieve the I/O control for hardware modules. And addanother three oscilloscope modules which based on USB bus to the instrumentdriver, to realize generality of instrument driver. 7. Completed the debugging of four modules which are based on USB bus andPXI bus.