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 in order to test the UUT.
Running under Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, or Windows 2000, 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 VXI, GPIB (IEEE-488), RS-232/422, PC boards, and 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 that enables 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 OLE/COM support, multithreading, and exception handling for developing complex applications. 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 especially 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, the ATEasy IDE provides a rapid application development environment (RAD). 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 very similar to other object-oriented environments. The 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, changes. In addition, all ATEasy documents can be saved to a text format allowing merging of changes between multiple users and tracking changes using version control software in a better way.