As the leader in modular oscilloscopes, ZTEC is continually looking for ways to pack even more benchtop oscilloscope features into our modular instrument products. One key and often overlooked aspect of a benchtop oscilloscope is the well defined and intuitive user interface. All technical professionals, at one point or another, have used a benchtop oscilloscope - turning horizontal and vertical adjustment knobs to capture a waveform of interest.
Figure I: User Controlled Benchtop Instrument
When developing automatic test equipment (ATE), the physical interface becomes less important as the instrument is typically controlled from a customized test program or test executive. In ATE, the computer becomes the user – programmatically adjusting instrument settings as needed by each unique test procedure. Because the physical user interface (i.e. bottoms, knobs, switches, and graphs) is less important in this environment, modular instrument platforms have become the solution of choice for many ATE developers. By leaving off the physical user interface, a modular instrument provides a compact ATE solution that is easily programmed and power efficient.
Figure II –Computer Controlled Modular Instruments in a Automatic Test Equipment System
Due to their PC compatibility, modular instruments are rapidly expanding from ATE into more mainstream instrument applications. These mainstream applications require more than a programmatic interface. Instead, an intuitive operator interface, one that provides a similar benchtop instrument user experience, is required. This user interface, often referred in industry as the “soft front panel,” is even needed within ATE as modular instrument assets are used for interactive diagnosis and troubleshooting.
Figure III – User Controlled Modular Instruments
In addition to providing a comprehensive driver library for programmatic control, ZTEC also provides the ZScope soft front panel for interactive control. ZScope’s intuitive interface provides complete instrument control. ZScope auto-detects your hardware and can be automatically configured using the Auto-Setup feature. Waveform data can be easily exported for use in other analysis applications and instrument settings can be saved for use at a latter time.
Figure IV: ZScope Interactive Soft Front Panel
The downside to canned soft front panels is that they are vendor defined and often do not reflect the needs of the individual customer. In these cases, customers can easily develop custom soft front panels simply by using the instrument drivers within a programming environment, such as National Instruments LabVIEW and LabWindows/CVI.
Figure V: LabVIEW Customized Soft Front Panel Example
ZTEC provides a number of tools to ensure the success of your custom soft front panel development project. For starters, instrument drivers are provided for the most common application development environments and standards (such as C, LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI, COM, Visual Studio, MATLAB). And of course, when you have questions, our support team is available to provide the assistance you need.
