USB Communication Via VISA For Measurement And Instrument Control In Test Systems

Nowadays the electronic units are found in almost every single device used in daily life.Smartphones, remote controls or more complex units like electronic circuits that theautomotive industry uses to manufacture safety systems, are good examples of products thatneed of a testing process before their release to the market.Automotive electronic systems are being used by companies in different locationsaround the world. New equipment for testing is being designed to use the USB port as ameans to communicate with the measurement instruments needed in test plans. Nonetheless,many of the functions developed to control these instruments are not using USB to programtheir modules. During the last years, many technologies based on Software Common forProgrammable Instruments (SCPI) have been launched into the market, and it is among themthat Virtual Instrument Software Architecture (VISA) outstands as one of the most completeand structured interfaces for USB communication. In this thesis dissertation, we present anovel model designed under Object-oriented design principles for instrument control in TestSystems. We focus on a simple device as is the Digital Multimeter, which is indispensable fortaking measurements.We design and implement some of the basic measurement operations for the DMM.These functions are the result of an extensive study on the area of instrumentation andcalibration. Although we have focused on a particular instrument, it is demonstrated how theframework developed for this thesis can be easily adapted to other instruments with similarproperties, and the most important, this model can be used as the basis to generate newinstances of objects aiming to use USB to communicate in a Test system with instruments.Finally, the results of our model are tested and applied in a production environment.