This chapter describes the ATEasy function procedures and includes information on the following topics:
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The ActiveX procedures allow the application to use Microsoft ActiveX™/COM (Component Object Model) controls and objects that are installed in your machine. These objects can be used to access external software components such as Microsoft Excel, Data Base, controls such as TreeView or Calendar, etc. The ActiveX procedures provide a way to create an object or to open existing one. |
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The COMM procedures allow the application to use COM (serial) port in order to communicate with devices connected to the COM port. The procedures allows to open, setup, read and write, and handle events from/to the COM port using the Windows COMM driver. COM devices can also be controlled using I/O Tables. |
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DDE procedures allow the application to communicate and control other Windows applications that support the Microsoft Dynamic Data Exchange protocol (DDE). The procedures allow to initiate conversation between client and server applications and issue DDE transaction used to pass data or commands between the applications. |
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The Drivers Information procedures allow the application to retrieve information about the currently configured drivers. Note that the System.Drivers and the ADriver objects provide more information regarding drivers. |
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The FileIO handling procedures allow the application to create, manipulate, open, read, write, and delete files. These functions may also be used in conjunction with the I/O Tables commands configured with File interface. |
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The GPIB procedures allow the application to use and control GPIB instruments. GPIB instruments are usually controlled by their driver I/O Table commands when configured with a GPIB interface. These low-level functions provide an extensive way to control the GPIB devices, bus and interface. |
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The Interfaces procedures allow the application to respond to events generated from interface and devices such as GPIB, COM , VXI and more. The user supplies a procedure, the interface type and the event to monitor (for example SRQ for GPIB) and ATEasy will call the user supplied procedure when the event occurs. |
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The Interrupts procedures allow the application to respond to events such as COM (character received), GPIB SRQ or Timer and user defined events. The user supplies the event and the procedure and ATEasy calls the procedure as the event occurs. The supported events are a subset of the SetInterfaceEvent that has a similar functionality. The internal variable InterruptMask is used to invoke an ATEasy Interrupt, each bit in that variable representing an Interrupt. This variable can be passed as an argument to a DLL procedure so that ATEasy interrupts will be invoked by the DLL procedure at a later time. This is similar to a callback support that is available in later versions of ATEasy. |
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The Log File/Information procedures allow the application to customize the test log output and to retrieve information about the currently running Program, Task, and Test. |
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The Math procedures allow the application to perform common mathematical calculations. |
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The Miscellaneous procedures include system utilities like displaying a message box, playing a beep alert sound, executing external programs, invoking the help window, touch panel, bit manipulation, LabVIEW support, form event handling and many more. |
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The MultiThreading procedures provide support for creating and handling multithreaded applications. Threads allow creating of concurrent or parallel execution unit that uses CPU time slice. For multiple core machines the time slice can be allocated on different core leading to a true parallel execution of ATEasy code. Thread can speed execution, provide simpler coding when multiple tasks need to be executed at the same time. Thread often requires the use of ATEasy synchronization objects such as ASemaphore or ACriticalSection to serialize access to shared resources. |
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The PC Resources procedures provide support for programming PC based devices. Port and Memory I/O procedures are provided. You can also use the HW.drv to access PCI/PXI devices and resources used by them. This functions are typically used when writing a driver to a PC board (e.g. ISA or PCI/PXI board). |
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The String procedures provide support for manipulation of strings and include functions for conversion of strings to numeric values, date/time conversion to string, trimming, searching, string tokenize and more. |
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Time (v.7) |
The Time procedures provide support for extracting a time component such as day of the week or an hour from a DataTime data type. |
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USB (v.7) |
The USB procedures provide support for programming USB (Universal Serial Bus). The procedures allows opening a USB devide, configuring and sending data or control packets to the device. USB devices can also be controlled using I/O Tables. |
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The Variant procedures provide support for querying variant data type properties such as type and dimension and for changing the variant type. |
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The VXI procedures provide support for programming VXI instruments. VXI instruments are usually controlled by their Driver I/O Table commands. The procedures are typically required only for controlling register-based devices. |
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The Winsock procedures provide support for programming devices using TCP/IP protocol stack in the ISO/OSI network communications model. TCP/IP is an industry standard communications protocol that defines methods for packaging data into packets for transmission between computing devices on a heterogeneous network. TCP/IP has become the standard for data transmission over networks, including the Internet. TCP establishes a connection for data transmission and IP defines the method for sending data packets. WinSocket devices can also be controlled using I/O Tables. |