By Michael Schwartz
In many of today’s software projects, developers are challenged with the task of designing interchangeable standards architecture into their metrology based applications. Currently, many developers see an oscilloscope as an oscilloscope and believe that all oscilloscopes are created equal, and are therefore interchangeable; at the same time, any oscilloscope manufacturer will tell you their oscilloscope is different with special features requiring non-standardized sets of commands to implement those special and specific features. Consequently, developers write their code to implement special and unique features in what was designed to be a generic driver. Cal Lab Solutions took a step back to re-evaluate the problem and all the solutions. We came up with a software design methodology that allows the user to incorporate non-standardized features of complex standards while maintaining a highly flexible interchangeable instrumentation model. This paper will demonstrate how a process centric model allows greater flexibility over the generic command centric model.
