ATEasy is a software development environment for Test and Measurements (T&M) applications. It contains all the tools required to develop test applications for Automated Test Equipment (ATE) systems and for instrument control applications. The purpose of the ATE system is to perform testing on one or more electronic products called Units Under Test (UUTs) such as components, boards, assemblies, etc. A typical ATE system consists of a computer/controller, several test and measurement instruments and a test application designed to control the system instruments to test the UUT.
Running under Microsoft Windows, ATEasy provides a familiar graphical user interface (GUI) combined with the flexibility of an object oriented programming environment. Users of Microsoft Visual Basic or Visual C++ will feel right at home.
Supporting any instrument, regardless of its interface, ATEasy develops an ATE application in a single integrated environment. With specialized features designed for testing and instrument control applications, ATEasy can also be used for data acquisition, process control, lab applications, calibration, and for any application requiring instrument control. ATEasy supports many instrument interfaces including GPIB (IEEE-488), RS-232/422, USB, VXI, PXI and PC boards, and LXI (TCP/IP).
ATEasy's Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is object oriented and data-driven. Editing tools are automatically selected by ATEasy according to the type of object to be created or modified. This feature simplifies programming, as you merely click on an object and ATEasy automatically selects the appropriate tool.
ATEasy's IDE includes tools for creating instrument drivers, user interface, tests, documentation, test executives, report generation and anything else you need to create T&M applications – all with point and click and drag and drop ease.
ATEasy contains a high-level programming language enabling test engineers, electronics engineers, and programmers to develop and integrate applications of any scale – small to large, simple to complex. The ATEasy programming language allows user-defined statements to be used along with flow control, procedures, variables, and other common items found in most programming languages. The ATEasy programming language is flexible and powerful, yet easy-to-use and self-documenting.
Professional programmers will appreciate ATEasy's programming language offering DLL calling, C header file importing for DLL functions prototype, OLE/COM/ActiveX controls support, .Net Assemblies, LabView® VIs (Virtual Instruments) or their libraries (LLB), function panel instrument driver files (used mostly by LabWindows/CVi®, multi-threading, exception handling, and many more software components and standards for developing complex applications in a truly open system architecture. ATEasy's programming language also contains many built-in programming elements to simplify programming, allowing a non-programmer to easily use ATEasy to develop an application.
The unique design of ATEasy provides a structured and integrated framework for developing reusable components and modules you can easily maintain and debug. These components can be reused from application to application reducing the time and effort of developing new, and maintaining existing, applications. The developer is given a framework specially designed for a T&M application. The framework contains pre-defined components designed for interfaces (such as GPIB), instruments control and drivers, system configuration, test requirement documents and test executives.
In addition, ATEasy IDE provides a Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment. This provides a way to write, run and debug applications in very short cycles as required by instrument-based applications. The ATEasy IDE is an object-oriented environment, making the editing of common tasks or objects displayed in the IDE like other object-oriented environments. Similar functionality greatly reduces the learning curve for ATEasy.
With ATEasy, multiple users can edit the same file representing a driver system or a program. Files contain version information that allows keeping track of, and documenting, the changes. In addition, all ATEasy documents can be saved to a text format allowing comparing and merging of changes between multiple users and tracking changes using version control software in a better way.