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Method and apparatus for controlling an instrumentation system

1. assistant UI as a series of HEX bytes separated by spaces As indicated at 344 the user may then select a region to be tokenized The user preferably selects a region to be tokenized by manipulating an icon in the display such as by using a pointer device e g a mouse trackball joystick touchpad etc In one embodiment the user may hover a mouse cursor or other icon over the instrument response and the mechanism may visually select the largest of a region of the response e g a 1 2 4 or 8 byte region The region may be calculated starting at the current mouse position and terminating either at the end of the instrument response or at the beginning of the next region A bounding rectangle color 40 45 65 22 fill and or other indicator may be used to visually indicate the region selected from the current hover position As indicated at 346 after selecting the region to be tokenized various characteristics of the token may be speci fied Characteristics of the token may be automatically determined by the instrument I O assistant or alternatively may be specified by the user through the instrument I O assistant user interface In one embodiment when a region is selected by hovering as described above a tip strip may be displayed above the selected region showing the set of possible data types and the value of the selected region for the possible data types The data types may include data types that occupy the r
2. 0002 10 922 ARLE ayy JO 800 US 7 134 081 B2 Sheet 6 of 14 Nov 7 2006 U S Patent vee 5129 eeg saryea ggg 94 dns diy G 614 payioadsun aad 00 99 23 91922 1 4 3 4 10 396 6 6 EO 83 4 211 326958 5 9 ae US 7 134 081 B2 Sheet 7 of 14 Nov 7 2006 U S Patent 960 uayo payoajasup pue 9 014 papales 062 US 7 134 081 B2 Sheet 8 of 14 Nov 7 2006 U S Patent 108 1198 614 suayo papaes OSY Aeuy 25 8 614 US 7 134 081 B2 jndjno 9 Sheet 9 of 14 BSP 0 CoG 40 10109 fene 105 ue s uayoy 610 Nov 7 2006 U
3. The user may also specify a sequence of values to be interpreted the same way for example an array For example the user may query 4000 data points so the user may tokenize the first 2 byte value and cause the parser to read the next consecutive 3999 2 byte values in the same manner as the first 2 byte value is read If the response is in ASCII format and there is a sequence of strings then the user may specify the delimiter for the sequence The value format controls may be used to determine how the value is output in the instrument control application programs e g LabVIEW For example the user may wish to output the above mentioned array of 4000 2 byte values as 4000 double values The user may also optionally name the output variable The user may also use the instrument I O assistant GUI to specify a scaling func tion if the values need to be scaled On occasion the user may desire a certain value output and be less concerned with the formatting of the response string In one embodiment the instrument I O assistant allows the user to choose to work from the value format area before dealing with the response format area Thus the instrument I O assistant does not constrain the user to following a set series of steps In one embodiment the instrument I O assistant GUI may also include an error return control that may be used to indicate an error or warning if any returned from the instrument due to the executed block This erro
4. architecture hierarchy Driver level software is used to interface the commands in the instrument driver to the actual hardware interface being used such as a GPIB interface card a data acquisition card or a VXI card In other words driver level software handles the details of communication 1 the transfer of commands and data over a physical connection between the computer and instruments There have been many implementations of I O control software some of which were custom developed by end users while others were developed by vendors and sold along with interface hardware Examples of driver level software include NI 488 NI DAQ and NI VISA driver level software offered by National Instruments Inc Another 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 4 example of driver level software is the Standard Instrument Control Library SICL offered by Hewlett Packard There may be some instruments for which drivers are not provided Also there may be users of an instrumentation system who do not want the complications that are inherent with learning to use a driver or that do not have access to a driver In this case the user may desire to simply send a command to the instrument and read a response The user may not require performance or special features but simply desires to connect to an instrument and perform Cur rently GPIB Serial or VISA calls may be used to send a command read the respons
5. automatic tokenization is correct then the user may accept the tokenization and proceed to creating the code at 310 US 7 134 081 B2 23 If the user determines that the automatic tokenization is not correct then the user may first determine if the delimiter i e separator used in automatic tokenization is correct as indicated at 366 If the user determines that the delimiter is not correct then the user may optionally specify a delimiter as indicated at 370 to assist in parsing the instrument response For example a comma may be entered as a delimiter If the user supplies a delimiter the instrument response may be automatically re tokenized based on the delimiter In one embodiment the delimiters are not included in the tokens As mentioned if the user determines that the delimiter is correct or if the user enters a corrected delimiter then the instrument response may be automatically tokenized using the delimiter and if applicable one or more other attributes of the token which may be automatically set or optionally may be specified by the user Automatic tokenization may include the instrument I O assistant automatically selecting regions in the response message to be tokenized based upon the delimiters in the response message Optionally the user may manually select a region or regions of the instrument response as indicated at 368 to override the region selection of the automatic tokenization In ASCII mode the user may
6. microphones etc and the types of information which might be collected by respective instru ments include voltage resistance distance velocity pres sure frequency of oscillation environmental information such as humidity and temperature video and image data and audio data among others In the past many instrumentation systems comprised individual instruments physically interconnected with each other Each instrument typically included a physical front panel with its own peculiar combination of indicators knobs or switches A user generally had to understand and manipulate individual controls for each instrument and record readings from an array of indicators Acquisition and analysis of data in such instrumentation systems was tedious and error prone An incremental improvement in the manner in which a user interfaced with various instruments was made with the introduction of centralized control panels In these improved systems individual instruments are wired to a control panel and the individual knobs indicators or switches of each front panel are either preset or selected for presentation on a common front panel A significant advance occurred with the introduction of computers to provide more flexible means for interfacing instruments with a user In such computerized instrumenta tion systems the user interacts with software executing on the computer system through the computer s video monitor rather than through a manu
7. select an area or region of the instrument response and the region may be automatically interpreted as either an ASCII number or as a string The user may use a hovering tech nique such as that described for HEX responses at 344 to select an area or region of the response to be tokenized As indicated at 372 after a region is selected as a token various characteristics of the token may be specified If the selected region contains a base ten integer or real number it may be automatically interpreted as a number but the user may choose to represent it as a string for example by changing the type attribute If the token is a number then the user may provide a count When specifying a count greater than one the user may also specify a separator and the specified separator may follow each of the ASCII number representations in the response string The token may then be represented as an ASCII enumerated array Once the user has specified a token as an array that is the token has a count greater than 1 then the user may optionally col lapse the token so that all of the elements of the array appear as one token element Note that the tokenization of values in an ASCII response as described above may be repeated one or more times for each value that the user wished to tokenize in the ASCII response The methods as described in FIGS 9 10 may be imple mented in software hardware or a combination thereof The order of method may
8. the response The user interacts with the IRPC to manually define the interpretation of the data In one embodiment upon receiving a response the instrument I O assistant may perform parsing functions on the response automatically and display the results of the parsing to the user via the IRPC 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 12 The user may then accept the automatic parsing or choose to override one or more functions of the parsing The instrument I O assistant GUI may include several sections that allow the user to select an instrument enter a command to query the instrument and script the result or response from the instrument The data in the response string may be shown as binary e g hexadecimal format or ASCII format this option may be toggled by the user by selecting a user interface item In one embodiment the user may not modify the response string The user may scroll through the response string to highlight the data the user is interested in The highlighted token may then read as a particular data type for example a 2 byte integer If the user selected a 1 byte integer as the data type then the highlighted region may shrink and only highlight one byte of data The byte order may be toggled for example a 2 byte integer repre sented by the HEX values 40 00 may be toggled to interpret the value as the 40 byte being most significant the 00 byte being most significant
9. 215 may show the interpreted value of the selected token As the user scrolls through the instrument response the results box may also scroll to align the response data with its corresponding parsed output data In one embodiment the data may be displayed graphi cally For example the data may be displayed as an X Y graph of the data over time as a chart e g bar chart or by any graphical method suitable for displaying the data In one embodiment the user may toggle between two or more different graphical displays of the data In this embodiment if the data includes multiple elements e g array data the array data may be graphed and if the data is a single element a textual ASCII character representation of the value of that single element may be displayed In another embodiment the data may be displayed textually This data may be highlighted to distinguish its output data type In yet another embodiment the data may be displayed both graphi cally and textually In one embodiment the user may toggle between graphical and textual display of the data The IRPC may be used as described for an instrument response from an instrument read or query In one embodi ment a similar IRPC interface may be used to specify the data format of data that will be written to an instrument This may be done for example by allowing the user to type a US 7 134 081 B2 17 command into the control and to specify the type via the tokenizatio
10. In one embodiment the appearance e g color and or texture of the icon e g a transparent lens icon may be used to specify the data type of the token As the user scrolls through to parse the rest of the data in the response the data may maintain its highlighted color to indicate that it is tokenized For every token in the data response the user may be able to specify the data type to interpret the token a count to specify a sequence or array of values a delimiter for an array of values the data type that the instrument I O assistant may use to output the data scaling parameters for that token and a name for the output parameter among other characteristics As indicated at 310 the instrument I O assistant may provide the ability to create code for later use in interfacing with message based instruments The results of the token specification as described above may be used to automati cally create a text based e g C and or graphi cal code e g a Lab VIEW graphical code object that can be included in a virtual instrument that may be used to programmatically perform the same functions as the instru ment I O assistant mechanism allowed the user to achieve interactively These functions may include communicating with an identified instrument sending command s to the identified instrument reading back responses from the instrument and parsing the received response for display or for other uses among others The
11. instrument I O assistant may also provide the ability to create code to call and execute the saved configuration from a graphical language and or a text based language The saved code for one query and response may be referred to as a query block A user may use the instrument I O assistant to perform the above func tions one or more times to generate a series of one or more query blocks which may be combined into a task The task may then be executed or alternatively code may be gener ated to execute the task FIG 10 Flowchart FIG 10 is a flowchart expanding on the parsing of the response as indicated at 308 of FIG 9 Some aspects of the behavior of the instrument assistant during parsing may be dependent upon whether the instrument response is in hexadecimal HEX or ASCII As indicated at 340 the instrument I O assistant may determine if the response is HEX or ASCII The instrument I O assistant may automati cally detect whether the instrument response is in HEX or ASCII or alternatively the user may be able to specify whether the instrument response is in HEX or ASCII If the response is in HEX the response may be displayed in a HEX format as indicated at 342 In HEX mode numeric tokens are interpreted in terms of their binary representation Note that other numerical formats may be used to display the numerical data In one embodiment the HEX instrument response may be displayed in a response field of an instru ment
12. not limited to IEEE 488 controlled instruments GPIB instruments VXI bus instru ments PXI bus instruments plug in data acquisition boards and serial instruments including RS 232 USB and IEEE 1394 instruments Background on these various hard ware interface options is deemed appropriate The GPIB General Purpose Interface Bus began as a bus designed by Hewlett Packard in 1965 referred to as the Hewlett Packard Interface Bus HPIB to connect their line of programmable instruments to their computers National Instruments Corporation expanded the use of this bus to computers manufactured by companies other than Hewlett Packard and hence the name General Purpose Interface Bus GPIB became more widely used than HPIB The GPIB interface bus gained popularity due to its high transfer rates and was later accepted as IEEE standard 488 1975 and the bus later evolved to ANSI IEEE standard 488 1 1987 In order to improve on this standard two new standards were drafted these being ANSI IEEE 488 2 1987 and the SCPI Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments stan dard The IEEE 488 2 standard strengthened the original standard by defining precisely how controllers and instru ments communicated The IEEE 488 2 standard removed ambiguities of the IEEE 488 1 standard by defining data formats status reporting a message exchange protocol IEEE 488 2 controller requirements and common configu ration commands to which all IEEE 48
13. or alternatively NI 488 2 for GPIB only to communicate with GPIB and Serial instruments and the generated code e g LabVIEW code will use a VISA API e g the VISA LabVIEW LV API The instrument I O assistant UI 200 may expose certain functionality specific to the bus the instrument selected is on such as Wait for SRQ in GPIB In one embodiment these options may be only be exposed if necessary for example through an Advanced Features tab When the user types a command to send to a particular instrument the instrument I O assistant may save that com mand and its syntax so that in another block or task when that instrument is selected again the user can view a history of commands used for that particular instrument In one embodiment these command histories may be saved away and exported so that they are available for distribution similar to instrument assistant tasks This may provide valid command options for the user without having to flip through an instrument manual among other benefits Parsing Instrument Responses Embodiments of the instrument I O assistant may provide the user with several capabilities for parsing instrument responses including but not limited to the ability to US 7 134 081 B2 15 automatically determine if the instrument response is in HEX or ASCII format switch between ASCII and HEX format while retaining token specifications automatically tokenize ASCII responses for t
14. query blocks 254 Task 250 may also include one or more query blocks 254 Note that subtasks 252 may also include nested subtasks 252 A task may also query certain data from the instrument silently without the user s knowledge to determine the state of the instrument For example a task may query the instrument to determine if headers are turned on or off so that the parser is aware of how to handle headers in the response Some instruments may support similar queries to determine other characteristics such as byte ordering In one embodiment these queries to determine the state of the instrument may be done automatically in a task so that user does not have to explicitly add these queries as part of their task FIG 12 is a flowchart illustrating a method of sequencing query blocks in tasks according to one embodiment As indicated at 500 a plurality of query blocks may be gener ated in response to user input Each query block may be executable within an instrumentation system to connect with a message based instrument send a query message to the message based instrument receive a response to the query message from the message based instrument parse the response and output results of parsing the response As indicated at 502 the user may graphically sequence the plurality of query blocks in a desired order of execution and store the sequenced plurality of query blocks in a task as indicated at 504 FIG 13 is a flowchart ill
15. 12 United States Patent Fuller et al US007134081B2 10 Patent No US 7 134 081 B2 54 75 73 21 22 65 60 51 52 58 56 METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CONTROLLING AN INSTRUMENTATION SYSTEM Inventors David W Fuller Austin TX US Christopher G Cifra Austin TX US Thomas V Connell Jr Austin TX US Assignee National Instruments Corporation Austin TX US Subject to any disclaimer the term of this patent is extended or adjusted under 35 U S C 154 b by 648 days Notice Appl No 10 103 391 Filed Mar 21 2002 Prior Publication Data US 2003 0035008 A1 Feb 20 2003 Related U S Application Data Provisional application No 60 312 257 filed on Aug 14 2001 Int CI 06 13 00 06 15 00 715 735 714 712 715 763 Field of Classification Search 715 763 715 765 853 771 735 736 737 714 712 714 738 718 See application file for complete search history 2006 01 2006 01 References Cited U S PATENT DOCUMENTS 5 724 272 A 3 1998 Mitchell et al 45 Date of Patent Nov 7 2006 5 954 829 9 1999 McLain et al 714 712 6 449 744 9 2002 Hansen 714 738 OTHER PUBLICATIONS National Instruments The Measurement and Automation Catalog 2000 pp 678 707 1999 Using the VISA Interactive Control VISAIC 4 pgs 1998 Using the VIS
16. 2 Linux Mac OS X HEX and ASCII Modes Some aspects of the behavior of the instrument I O assistant may be dependent upon whether the instrument response is a hexadecimal HEX data format representation of binary data or ASCII data format If the instrument response is in HEX then the operation of the instrument I O assistant may be described as being in HEX mode Likewise if the instrument response is in ASCII then the operation of the instrument I O assistant may be described as being in ASCII mode The instrument I O assistant may automati cally detect whether the instrument response is in HEX or ASCII or alternatively the user may be able to specify whether the instrument response is in HEX or ASCII In one embodiment a user interface item 216 as illustrated in FIG 3 may allow the user to toggle between HEX and ASCII mode HEX Mode FIGS 4 6 illustrate an embodiment of the instrument I O assistant UI 200 in HEX mode In HEX mode numeric tokens are interpreted in terms of their binary representation The following describes an embodiment of a mechanism that may be used by the instrument I O assistant in HEX mode to find and select strings and multi byte sized data in an instrument response Note that while FIGS 4 6 and the following description show the response as displayed in a hexadecimal format other numerical formats e g binary octal decimal etc may also be used to display the response In one embodiment the user
17. 2 through a serial port Ethernet port or a proprietary inter face A fieldbus interface card may be comprised in the computer 102 and may interface through a fieldbus network to one or more fieldbus devices The GPIB card 122 serial interface card 184 and or other interface cards if any are typically plugged in to an I O slot in the computer 102 such as a PCI bus slot or a PC Card slot provided by the computer 102 In typical industrial automation systems a device will not be present of each interface type and in fact many systems may only have one or more devices of a single interface type such as only serial devices The devices may be coupled to the device or process 150 As used herein the term instrument is intended to include any of the devices that are adapted to be connected to a computer system as shown in FIGS 1A and 1B traditional stand alone instruments as well as other types of measurement and control devices As used herein the term message based instrument includes instruments or measurement and or automation devices that are controlled by messages e g by strings of ASCII and or hexadecimal characters Exemplary message based instruments are shown in FIGS 1A and 1B The term measurement func tion may include any type of data acquisition measurement or control function such as that implemented by the instru ments shown in FIGS 1A and 1B For example the term measurement function inc
18. 8 2 instruments must respond in a precise manner Thus the IEEE 488 2 standard created more compatible more reliable systems that were simpler to program In 1990 a new specification was developed referred to as the Standard Commands for Pro grammable Instruments SCPI which used the command structures defined in the IEEE 488 2 standard and formed a single comprehensive programming command set that is used with any SCPI instrument The SCPI standard simpli fied the programming process for manufacturers and users alike Rather than having to learn a different command set for each instrument the user could focus on solving the measurement tests of his or her application thus decreasing programming time The VXI VME eXtension for Instrumentation bus is a platform for instrumentation systems that was first intro duced in 1987 and was originally designed as an extension of the VME bus standard The VXI standard has experienced tremendous growth and acceptance around the world and is used in a wide variety of traditional test and measurement and ATE applications The VXI standard uses a mainframe chassis with a plurality of slots to hold modular instruments on plug in boards The VXI architecture is capable of interfacing with both message based instruments and regis ter based instruments A message based instrument is an instrument that is controlled by a string of ASCII characters US 7 134 081 B2 3 whereas register based instru
19. A Interactive Control to Communicate with VXI VME Devices 4 pgs 2001 NI 488 2 User Manual for Windows Jun 1999 Edition pp 6 1 through 6 11 GPIB Troubleshooting Resources Introduction to the Interactive Control IBIC 2003 pp 1 6 cited by examiner Primary Examiner Cao Kevin Nguyen 74 Attorney Agent or Firm Meyertons Hood Kivlin Kowert amp Goetzel P C Jeffrey C Hood 57 ABSTRACT An instrument assistant and the algorithms that may be used to manage instrument responses and that may provide an instrument centric approach to message based instrument The instrument I O assistant may assist the user in parsing instrument responses by offering an environment to interact with an instrument response without forcing the user to write parsing code Embodiments may be integrated into instrumentation control programs to make instrument as transparent as possible The instrument I O assistant may provide code generation so that the parsing of an instrument response performed in the instrument I O assistant can be reused The saved code for one query and response may be referred to as a query block Two or more query blocks may be saved into a task A task is a series of executable query blocks The task may be executed or alternatively code may be generated to execute the task 61 Claims 14 Drawing Sheets US 7 134 081 B2 Sheet 1 of 14 Nov 7 2006 U S Patent
20. Controller not shown or a distributed data acquisition system such as the Fieldpoint system available from National Instruments among other types of devices The GPIB instrument 112 may be coupled to the computer 102 via the GPIB interface card 122 provided by the 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 8 computer 102 The GPIB card 122 serial interface card 184 and or other interface cards if any are typically plugged in to an slot in the computer 102 such as a PCI bus slot a PC Card slot or an ISA EISA or MicroChannel bus slot provided by the computer 102 However the cards 122 and 184 are shown external to computer 102 for illustrative purposes These devices may also be connected to the computer 102 through a serial bus or through other means A VXI chassis or instrument may be coupled to the computer 102 via a VXI bus MXI bus or other serial or parallel bus provided by the computer 102 The computer 102 may include VXI interface logic such as a VXI MXI not shown or GPIB interface card 122 which interfaces to the VXI chassis A PXI chassis or instrument may be coupled to the computer 102 through the computer s PCI bus A serial instrument 182 and associated serial interface card 184 may also be coupled to the computer 102 through a serial port such as an RS 232 port USB Universal Serial bus or IEEE 1394 or 1394 2 buses provided by the com puter 102 In typical instrumentation cont
21. RRED EMBODIMENT The preferred embodiment of the invention is adapted for instrumentation control systems However it is noted that the method and apparatus of the present invention discloses a software architecture model that has numerous other applications in any of a number of fields The following disclosure describes the preferred embodiment of the inven tion in an instrumentation control system application FIGS 1B Instrumentation and Industrial Automa tion Systems The following describes embodiments of the present invention involved with performing test and or measure ment functions and or controlling and or modeling instru mentation or industrial automation hardware The system and method of the present invention may assist the user in parsing data such as instrument responses without forcing the user to write parsing code The data may be of any of a variety of types of data including but not limited to ASCII data and binary data It is noted that the present invention may be used for a plethora of applications and data and is not limited to instrumentation or industrial automation applications and data In other words the following description is exemplary only and the present invention may be used in any of various types of systems to parse any of various types of data Thus the system and method of the present invention is operable to be used in any of various types of applications including the control of
22. S Patent U S Patent Nov 7 2006 Sheet 10 of 14 US 7 134 081 B2 Detect instrument s 300 User selects instruments OR types in a VISA resource string 302 Enter command to send to instrument 304 Receive response from instrumeni 306 Parse instrument response 308 Create code 310 Fig 9 U S Patent Nov 7 2006 Sheet 11 of 14 US 7 134 081 B2 Parse instrument response Fig 10 Hex or ASCII 340 HEX Display response in ASCH format 360 Display response in HEX format 342 Select region 344 Specify token characteristics 346 Automatically Tokenize use default delimiters 362 Is Tokenization correct 364 Yes Delimeter Yes correct 366 Select region optional Specify delimiter optional 368 370 Specifiy token characteristics 372 Create code 310 U S Patent Nov 7 2006 Sheet 12 of 14 US 7 134 081 B2 Subtask 252A Fig 11 Generate a plurality of query blocks 500 Sequence the plurality of query blocks 502 1 Store the sequence of query blocks in task 504 Fig 12 U S Patent Nov 7 2006 Sheet 13 of 14 US 7 134 081 B2 Generate a task object 510 Add the task object to an instrument control program 512 Invoke a user interface UI to edit task object 514 Generate one or more query blacks 516 Add the one or more query blocks to the task object u
23. a repository of common error responses so that if an instru ment returns an error number then the instrument I O assistant may interpret and display the error For example error number 113 may resolve to an Undefined header error It is a common error to which users often fall victim The instrument I O assistant may display only descriptive US 7 134 081 B2 25 human readable errors in lieu of numerics and non descrip tive strings like Undefined Header In one embodiment when the user saves a task that has been created the task may be accessible in a query block palette menu in the instrument I O assistant Tasks may be organized hierarchically under the device that task belongs to in the query block palette menu In one embodiment when an already defined task is inserted into a new task that task may not appear as one sequence block in the new task but instead may be expanded into the one or more query blocks that compose the predefined task The sequence corresponding to the inserted task may be annotated in the new task to illustrate that the inserted task has been expanded into its query blocks If the user edits any of the query blocks that make up the inserted task then the annotation may disappear and may lose the coupling with the inserted task If the user edits a Task A then a Task B that includes Task A may be automatically updated to include the changes to Task A If the user changes one of the blocks
24. about the data it is trying to interpret If the parser makes incorrect or false assumptions the user may be provided with a mechanism to correct those faulty assumptions Character istics associated with instrument command strings and response strings that the user may set or change in order to define the desired command response include but are not limited to Data type What is the size and format of the data the user desires For example a 2 byte or 4 byte integer a float or double Binary text format For example does a response of A mean the letter A or is it a hex value Endianness Byte ordering may be different for different instruments Tokens Sequences If a series of values are the response i e an array how are the values delimited and how is the end of the data sequence determined Scaling Many instruments will return a value within a range such as 0 and 4096 but in reality the value is scaled between two other values such as 5 and 5 The value 4096 is not very meaningful to a user that is measuring voltage readings between 5 and 5 volts The user may be able to specify how the data is scaled so that scaled value is displayed and not the raw value Output data waveforms etc how does the user desire to write complex data to an output instrument Headers On Off Some instruments may support headers e g an instrument returning a voltage reading would return VOLT 10 0 when headers are
25. ally operated front panel to control one or more real world instruments The software executing on the computer system can be used to simulate the operation of an instrument in software or to control or communicate with one or more real world instruments these software created controlled instruments being referred to as virtual instruments Therefore modern instrumentation systems are moving from dedicated stand alone hardware instruments such as oscilloscopes digital multimeters etc to a concept referred to as virtual instrumentation Virtual instrumentation com _ 0 20 35 40 45 55 60 65 2 prises general purpose personal computers and workstations combined with instrumentation software and hardware to build a complete instrumentation system In an exemplary virtual instrumentation system a software program execut ing on a central computer controls the constituent instru ments from which it acquires data which it analyzes stores and presents to a user of the system Computer control of instrumentation has become increasingly desirable in view of the increasing complexity and variety of instruments available for use and computerized instrumentation systems provide significant performance efficiencies over earlier systems for linking and controlling test instruments The various hardware interface options currently avail able for instrumentation systems can be categorized into various types including but
26. annotated as part of Task A within Task B then the tie between Task A and Task B may be lost Task Execution Typically in the Workshop environment a task may be run repetitively as the user interacts with the task In the case of the instrument I O assistant task execution may need to be run in sequence only when a change has been made to a block that requires a run of the task For example a query block should not be executed while the user is typing in the command to be sent The task may be executed only when the user applies the block The task will not be run repetitively it may only be run once when the user modifies the block Various embodiments may further include receiving sending or storing instructions and or data implemented in accordance with the foregoing description upon a carrier medium Generally speaking a carrier medium may include storage media or memory media such as magnetic or optical media e g tape disk or CD ROM volatile or non volatile media such as RAM e g SDRAM DDR SDRAM RDRAM SRAM ROM etc as well as transmission media or signals such as electrical electromagnetic or digital signals conveyed via a communication medium such as network and or a wireless link Although the method and apparatus of the present inven tion has been described in connection with the preferred embodiment it is not intended to be limited to the specific form set forth herein but on the contrary it is
27. asks and query blocks according to one embodiment FIG 12 is a flowchart illustrating a method of sequencing query blocks in tasks according to one embodiment FIG 13 is a flowchart illustrating a method of generating a task object and graphically editing the generated task object according to one embodiment and FIG 14 is a flowchart illustrating a method of scanning for instruments according to one embodiment While the invention is susceptible to various modifica tions and alternative forms specific embodiments thereof are shown by way of example in the drawings and will herein be described in detail It should be understood however that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit the invention to the particular form disclosed but on the contrary the intention is to cover all modifications equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope of the present invention as defined by the appended claims The headings used herein are for organi zational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims As used through out this application the word may is used in a permissive sense i e meaning having the potential to rather than the US 7 134 081 B2 7 mandatory sense 1 meaning must Similarly the words include including and includes mean including but not limited to DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFE
28. ast a subset of the parsed instrument responses to one or more other objects in the instrument control application program 14 The method of claim 1 further comprising repeating said sending said receiving and said parsing for a plurality of query messages to the message based instrument generating a query block for each of the repetitions wherein the query block comprises program instruc tions that are executable to perform said sending said receiving and said parsing as specified for the particu lar repetition and adding the plurality of generated query blocks for each of the repetitions to a task in memory 15 The method of claim 14 wherein the task comprises the plurality of query blocks in a sequence and wherein the task is executable to execute the plurality of query blocks in the sequence 16 The method of claim 14 wherein the task is a graphical object configured for use in a graphical program ming environment 17 The method of claim 14 wherein the task is a text based module configured for use in a textual program ming environment US 7 134 081 B2 27 18 The method of claim 1 wherein the response is displayed in hexadecimal format 19 The method of claim 1 wherein the response is displayed in ASCII format 20 The method of claim 19 wherein the data format is one of hexadecimal and ASCII 21 The method of claim 1 further comprising determin ing a data format of the response wherein said d
29. ated query blocks for each of the repetitions to a task in memory wherein the task comprises the plurality of query blocks in a sequence and wherein the task is executable to execute the plurality of query blocks in the sequence 59 The computer readable memory medium of claim 58 wherein the task is a graphical object configured for use in a graphical programming environment 60 The computer readable memory medium of claim 58 wherein the task is a text based module configured for use in a textual programming environment 61 The computer readable memory medium of claim 49 wherein the response is displayed in one of a hexadecimal format and an ASCII format
30. be changed and various steps may be added reordered combined omitted modified etc Workshop Framework In one embodiment a Workshop Framework may be used to save tasks made up of query blocks as the user creates them and the created tasks may then be reused within instrument I O assistant The term Workshop Frame work refers to a graphical user interface wherein tasks or query blocks can be graphically assembled into a script or program For example the user can use the Workshop Framework to graphically select a plurality of query blocks e g represented by icons and configure the icons in a desired order of execution thereby creating a task For example the user may create a trigger task for an HP 54645 scope and save it The task will then show up in a block palette menu from where the user may select query blocks and or tasks The user may then reuse the trigger task within 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 24 another task By persisting tasks users may be able to reuse their own tasks and also may share their tasks with other users Tasks may be collected and organized for distribution for example through a website As previously described a single task may include any number of query blocks and may include one or more other tasks as subtasks FIG 11 illustrates a task 250 with nested subtasks and query blocks according to one embodiment Each subtask 252 includes one or more
31. bly L 1 HUN YOL WOMEN 201 OMEN US 7 134 081 B2 Sheet 2 of 14 Nov 7 2006 U S Patent 91 MOJ 5599044 1185914 Re 2 681 jenas 5 78 E gt gt 09 ME MOM N US 7 134 081 B2 Sheet 3 of 14 Nov 7 2006 U S Patent 2 64 061 5 peseg 1910 sng 9199 mie col 081 ald sng uoisuedxa 891 sng 291 sng 150 oa 2 Ns Kowa 991 uen 081 US 7 134 081 B2 Sheet 4 of 14 Nov 7 2006 U S Patent 022 BIZ j a ee bee 500 222 Meare a 00 _ __ a Se 012 A 7 PIZ 84891 057 1 002 gt pasey abessau 77 94 3 202 POF US 7 134 081 B2 Sheet 5 of 14 Nov 7 2006 U S Patent 1 020 212 ayiq
32. d a query message to the message based instrument receive a response to the query message from the message based instrument parse the response and output results of parsing the response Entering Instrument Commands As illustrated in FIG 3 in an exemplary instrument I O assistant UI 200 a user may enter commands by typing them in to a query field 210 After entering the command the user 0 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 14 may select a user interface item to cause the command to be sent the instrument In one embodiment if the instrument VO assistant may determine the instrument type e g DMM scope arbitrary waveform arb function generator counter etc or alternatively if the user specifies the instrument type then syntax completion and suggestions for example according to the SCPI standard may be provided to the user through the UI 200 In one embodiment instrument vendors and or third parties may provide a file for a specific instru ment that describes the command syntax of the instrument This file may then be used by the instrument assistant providing syntax information to the user If such a file exists then the standard SCPI syntax completion may be replaced with syntax completion based on the custom file In one embodiment a history of entered commands may be retained The command history may be used in any of several ways to assist the user For example when the use
33. d as either a number such as token 212 of FIG 3 or as a string such as token 240 of FIG 7 The user may use a hovering technique such as that described for HEX mode to select an area or region of the response 211 to be tokenized To assist in parsing the instrument response the user may specify one or more separators or delimiters For example the comma is selected as a separator in field 214 of FIGS 3 7 and 8 When a separator is supplied the instrument response 211 is automatically tokenized based on the separator s The separators are not included in the tokens If the selected region contains a base ten integer or real number it is automatically interpreted as a number but the user can choose to represent it as a string for example by changing the type 222 attribute as illustrated in FIG 3 As illustrated in FIG 8 if the token is a number then the user may provide a count 220 When specifying a count greater than one the user may also specify a separator 214 and the specified separator may follow each of the ASCII number representations in the response string 211 The token may then be represented as an ASCII enumerated array 213 Once the user has specified a token as an array that is a count greater than 1 then the user has the option to collapse the token so that all of the elements of the array appear as only one token element Code Creation The instrument I O assistant may provide the ability to create code fo
34. dance with the specified attributes 50 The computer readable memory medium of claim 49 wherein said specifying one or more attributes of the selected region configures the selected region as a token in accordance with the specified attributes 51 The computer readable memory medium of claim 49 wherein the specified one or more attributes of the selected region include one or more of data type byte ordering position size count name and scaling 52 The computer readable memory medium of claim 49 wherein the program instructions are further executable to implement prior to said sending the query message speci fying the message based instrument to receive the query message in response to user input 53 The computer readable memory medium of claim 52 wherein in said specifying the message based instrument the program instructions are further executable to implement selecting the message based instrument from a list of two or more instruments coupled to the instrumentation system in response to user input 54 The computer readable memory medium of claim 49 wherein the program instructions are further executable to implement wa 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 30 generating a query block in response to said parsing wherein the query block comprises program instruc tions that are executable to perform said sending said receiving and said parsing and storing the generated query block to memory wherein th
35. distributed data acquisition process control advanced analysis or other control The one or more instruments may include message based instruments such as a GPIB instrument 112 and associated GPIB interface card 122 a serial instrument 182 and asso ciated serial interface card 184 and or one or more message based instruments 118 and associated instrument cards not shown The host computer 102 may optionally also connect to other types of devices such as a data acquisition board and associated signal conditioning circuitry not shown a VXI instrument not shown a PXI instrument not shown a video device or camera and associated image acquisition or machine vision card not shown a motion control device and associated motion control interface card not shown and or one or more computer based instrument cards not shown a fieldbus device and associated fieldbus interface card not shown a PLC Programmable Logic Controller not shown or a distributed data acquisition system such as US 7 134 081 B2 9 the Fieldpoint system available from National Instruments among other types of devices The GPIB instrument 112 may be coupled to the computer 102 via the GPIB interface card 122 provided by the computer 102 The serial instrument 182 may be coupled to the computer 102 through a serial interface card 184 or through a serial port such as an RS 232 port provided by the computer 102 A PLC may couple to the computer 10
36. e UI according to one embodiment in ASCII mode FIG 4 illustrates an exemplary instrument I O assistant User Interface UI according to one embodiment in HEX mode and shows a series of regions tokenized into a hex byte array FIG 5 illustrates an exemplary instrument assistant User Interface UI according to one embodiment in HEX mode and shows a user hovering the cursor over a region and a corresponding tip strip FIG 6 illustrates an exemplary instrument I O assistant User Interface UI according to one embodiment in HEX mode and shows a selected region specified as a string token FIG 7 illustrates an exemplary instrument I O assistant User Interface UI according to one embodiment in ASCII mode and shows a selected region specified as a string token FIG 8 illustrates an exemplary instrument I O assistant User Interface UI according to one embodiment in ASCII mode and shows a selected region specified as an ASCII numerical array token FIG 9 is a flowchart of a method of querying message based instruments parsing the responses and generating code that encapsulates the connection communication with the instrument and the parsing of the response according to one embodiment FIG 10 is a flowchart expanding on the parsing of the response and showing the different aspects of the parsing depending upon response type e g HEX or ASCII accord ing to one embodiment FIG 11 illustrates a task 250 with nested subt
37. e and the user is required to use the Application Development Environment ADE to create a program to parse the response Thus in many cases the user may be forced to write mini instrument drivers with the desired subset instrument functionality Both instrument connection communication and instrument response parsing are difficult and time consuming tasks Therefore a system and method is desired which provides consistent software architecture for control of instrumenta tions systems A method and apparatus is also desired which provides a more consistent mechanism for developing instrument drivers and instrumentation control software A system and method are also desired which encapsulates the connection communication with the instrument and the parsing of the instrument response SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION The present invention comprises various embodiments of a system and method for querying message based instru ments automatically and or graphically parsing the responses and generating code that encapsulates the con nection communication with the instrument and the parsing of the response Embodiments of the invention may be implemented in a measurement system comprising a com puter system coupled to one or more message based instru ments In an embodiment the computer system may automati cally detect the one or more message based instruments that are connected to the computer system In other words the computer system may au
38. e query block is executable within the instru mentation system to interact with the selected message based instrument to perform said sending said receiv ing and said parsing 55 The computer readable memory medium of claim 54 wherein the query block is a graphical object configured for use in a graphical programming environment 56 The computer readable memory medium of claim 54 wherein the query block is a text based module configured for use in a textual programming environment 57 The computer readable memory medium of claim 54 wherein the program instructions are further executable to implement adding the query block to an instrument control applica tion program executing the instrument control application program and executing the query block within the instrument control application program to interact with the selected mes sage based instrument to perform said sending said receiving and said parsing 58 The computer readable memory medium of claim 49 wherein the program instructions are further executable to implement repeating said sending said receiving and said parsing for a plurality of query messages to the message based instrument generating a query block for each of the repetitions wherein the query block comprises program instruc tions that are executable to perform said sending said receiving and said parsing as specified for the particu lar repetition and adding the plurality of gener
39. eans of memory controller 164 The main memory 166 may store the graphical program operable to receive and respond to programmatic events The main memory may also store operating system software as well as other software for operation of the computer system The host bus 162 may be coupled to an expansion or input output bus 170 by means of a bus controller 168 or bus bridge logic The expansion bus 170 may be the PCI Peripheral Component Interconnect expansion bus although other bus types can be used The expansion bus 170 includes slots for various devices such as a serial interface card 184 which provides a serial interface to a serial instru ment a GPIB interface card 122 which provides a GPIB bus interface to a GPIB instrument and or one or more other message based instrument interface cards 190 The com puter may further comprise a video display subsystem 180 and or hard drive 182 coupled to the expansion bus 170 As described above one or more instruments may also be connected to the computer through instrument interface cards In various embodiments one or more instruments or devices may be connected to the computer through means other than an expansion slot e g the instrument or device may be connected via an IEEE 1394 bus USB or other type of port Instrument I O Assistant Embodiments of an instrument I O assistant and the algorithms that may be used to manage instrument responses are described An instrument I O as
40. egion and or smaller portions thereof The user may then select a data type for the region from the tip strip One embodiment may provide the user with the ability to slide the token specification a byte at a time over the instrument response within the available space When slid ing the token specification the tip strip may slide along with it The tip strip may display the set of possible data types and the value of the current region for the possible data types One embodiment may provide the user with the ability to resize a string token This may be accomplished for example by allowing the user to grab the edge of a string token s bounding rectangle and enlarge or shrink the rect angle a byte at a time bounded by the available space The minimum size of a string token is one character When the user specifies a token s data type the instru ment response may be graphically annotated to show the selected token In one embodiment this may be done with a bounding rectangle and or color fill that represents the data type Other methods may be used to graphically annotate the selected token One or more attributes of the selected token may be displayed in fields of the instrument I O assistant user interface The user may specify the count of a selected token In one embodiment the count for tokens of a string type may not be specified If the count is greater than one then the token may be interpreted as a contiguous set of values o
41. ent parse the response and output results of parsing the response The user may graphically sequence the plurality of query blocks in a desired order of execution and store the sequenced plurality of query blocks in a task In one embodiment a task object may be generated in response to user input The user may then graphically add the task object to an instrument control application program The user may invoke a user interface for graphically editing the task object The user may then graphically generate one or more query blocks using the user interface Each query block may be executable within an instrumentation system to connect with a message based instrument send a query message to the message based instrument receive a response to the query message from the message based instrument parse the response and output results of said 20 30 40 45 50 55 60 65 6 parsing the response The user may then graphically add the one or more query blocks to the task object BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS A better understanding of the present invention can be obtained when the following detailed description of the preferred embodiment is considered in conjunction with the following drawings in which FIGS 1A 1B and 2 illustrate representative instrumen tation control systems of the present invention including various I O interface options FIG 3 illustrates an exemplary instrument I O assistant User Interfac
42. f a particular size and type starting at the selected token e g an array Once the user has specified a token as an array that is the token has a count greater than 1 then the user may have the option to collapse the token so that all of the elements of the array appear as one token element In one embodiment the count defaults to 1 In one embodiment the count may be set to the value of a named token that was previously specified by the user and that precedes the selected token When the count is set to a named token the value of the named token may be used as the count value for the currently selected token When the user specifies a count that evaluates to a number greater than one the instrument response string may be graphically annotated to show the individual elements of the set connected together Note that the tokenization of values in a HEX response as described above may be repeated one or more times for each value that the user wished to tokenize in the HEX response If the response is in ASCII the response may be displayed in an ASCII format as indicated at 360 In ASCII mode the instrument I O assistant user interface may be used to find and select alphanumeric strings and numbers in the instru ment response As indicated at 362 the response may be automatically tokenized using default delimiters The user may examine the tokenized response to determine if the automatic tokenization is correct as indicated at 364 If the
43. for the sequence As indicated at 308 the received response may then be parsed In one embodiment the instrument I O assistant may pre parse instrument responses Using parsing for example instead of a string of ASCII characters and binary numbers the user will see the actual number s correspond ing to a voltage reading If the pre parsing does not interpret the instrument response correctly then the user may inter actively and graphically vary how the response string is parsed Characteristics associated with instrument command strings and response strings that may be set or changed by the user in order to define the desired command response include but are not limited to data type binary text format endianness tokens sequences scaling output data wave forms etc and headers on off In one embodiment the user may operate to graphically parse the response Stated another way the user may graphi cally configure the way in which the response is parsed For example the user may graphically position an icon over respective portions of the data to delineate different portions of the data as tokens In one embodiment the user may position or size an icon such as a transparently colored lens icon that spans over a portion of the response data and then US 7 134 081 B2 21 the user may highlight the icon thus selecting the data for tokenization The data underneath the icon e g a lens icon is set apart as a token
44. hat may later be used to communicate with the identified instru ment send command s to the identified instrument read back responses from the instrument and parse the received response for display or for other uses The instrument I O assistant may provide a user interface to perform each of these functions In one embodiment the user interface may be a Graphical User Interface GUI In one embodiment the instrument I O assistant may pro vide a graphical user interface window through which each of these functions may be performed under user control Several examples of such a user interface U I 200 are illustrated in FIGS 3 through 8 described below The saved code for one query and response may be referred to as a query block A user may use the instrument 1 assistant to perform the above functions two or more times to generate a series of two or more query blocks which may be saved into a task A task is a series of sequentially executable query blocks The task may later be executed or alternatively code may be generated to execute the task As an example of generating and using a task in a graphical instrument control application program a task object may be added to a program e g a virtual instrument program being created or edited From the task object an instrument I O assistant user interface UI may be invoked The instrument I O assistant UI may be used to create and add one or more query blocks to the ta
45. he instrumentation system of claim 26 wherein the program instructions are further executable to generate a query block in response to said parsing wherein the query block comprises program instruc tions that are executable to perform said sending said receiving and said parsing and store the generated query block to the memory 32 The instrumentation system of claim 31 wherein the query block is executable within the instrumentation system to send the query message of the query block to the message based instrument receive the response from the message based instrument select one or more regions of the response and configure each of the selected one or more regions as a token in accordance with the specified one or more attributes of the particular region 33 The instrumentation system of claim 31 wherein the query block is a text based module configured for use in a textual programming environment 34 The instrumentation system of claim 31 wherein the query block is a graphical object configured for use in a graphical programming environment 35 The instrumentation system of claim 31 wherein the program instructions are further executable to add the query block to an instrument control application program stored in the memory execute the instrument control application program and execute the query block within the instrument control application program to interact with the selected mes sage based instru
46. he user automatically parse responses and or allow the user to graphically parse the responses save and reuse the user s instrument I O assistant con figuration and programmatically execute the saved configuration The term token as used herein refers to a portion or region of the instrument response whose attributes e g data type position size byte ordering arrayness name scaling etc have been configured FIG 3 illustrates one example of a token 212 in response field 211 of the instrument I O assistant UI 200 The configuration of the token may have been done either automatically or under user control for example by the user selecting or specifying attributes of the selected token in the attributes fields 218 as illustrated in FIG 3 The term tokenize as used herein refers to the act of specifying tokens for an instrument response In one embodiment instrument I O assistant may parse instrument responses In one embodiment instrument T O assistant may use a library of data import functions to pre parse instrument responses Using parsing for example instead of a string of ASCII characters and binary numbers the user will see the actual number s corresponding to a voltage reading If the pre parsing does not interpret the instrument response correctly then the user may interac tively vary how the response string is parsed The parser may be able to automatically make intelligent assumptions
47. intended to cover such alternatives modifications and equivalents as can be reasonably included within the spirit and scope of the invention as defined by the appended claims What is claimed is 1 Amethod executable within an instrumentation system comprising sending a query message to a message based instrument receiving a response from the message based instrument and parsing the response wherein said parsing comprises displaying the response graphically selecting a region of the displayed response in response to user input and specifying one or more attributes of the selected region wherein the selected region is configured in accordance with the specified attributes 2 The method of claim 1 wherein said specifying one or more attributes of the selected region configures the selected region as a token in accordance with the specified attributes 5 20 30 50 26 3 The method of claim 1 wherein the specified one more attributes of the selected region include one or more of data type byte ordering position size count name and scaling 4 The method of claim 1 further comprising prior to said sending the query message specifying the message based instrument to receive the query message in response to user input 5 The method of claim 4 wherein specifying the mes sage based instrument comprises selecting the message based instrument from a list of two or more instruments coupled to the in
48. ion system Therefore implementation of such systems fre quently requires the involvement of a programmer to develop software for acquisition analysis and presentation of instrumentation data The software architecture for a virtual instrumentation system comprises several components The top level of the software architecture typically comprises an applications program used for high level control of the virtual instru ment Examples of program development environments for high level applications programs for instrumentation control are LabVIEW and LabWindows CVI from National Instru ments Corp and HP VEE from Agilent among others These applications programs provide a user with the tools to control instruments including acquiring data analyzing data and presenting data The applications programs mentioned above typically operate in conjunction with one or more instrument drivers to interface to actual physical instruments For example the LabVIEW and LabWindows CVI applications software each include instrument libraries comprising drivers for hundreds or more of GPIB VXI PXI and serial instruments from numerous manufacturers The instrument drivers are designed to reduce a user s application development time by providing intuitive high level functions that relieve the user of complex low level instrument programming The software level referred to as driver level software is lower than the instrument driver level in the software
49. isplaying the response displays the response in accordance with the determined data format 22 The method of claim 1 wherein said displaying the response displays the response in accordance with a data format the method further comprising after said specifying one or more attributes of the selected region changing the displayed response to another data format in response to user input and wherein the selected region is configured in accordance with the specified attributes after said changing 23 The method of claim 1 further comprising tokenizing the response prior to said graphically selecting the region 24 The method of claim 1 wherein the response is an ASCII response wherein said displaying the response dis plays the response as one or more ASCII tokens generated by said tokenizing 25 The method of claim 1 wherein said specifying the one or more attributes of the selected region is performed in response to user input 26 An instrumentation system comprising a computing device comprising a processor and a memory a message based instrument coupled to the computing device a unit under test coupled to the message based instrument wherein the memory comprised in the computing device comprises program instructions executable within the computing device to send a query message to the message based instrument receive a response from the message based instrument and parse the response wherein to pa
50. ludes acquisition and or pro cessing of an image As described below a graphical pro gram may be created that implements a measurement func tion For example the graphical program may be used to acquire a signal and perform the measurement function on the acquired signal In the embodiments of FIGS 1A and 1B above one or more of the various instruments may couple to the computer 102 over a network such as the Internet In one embodi ment the user operates to select a target instrument or device from a plurality of possible target devices for programming or configuration Thus the user may create a program on a computer and use the program in conjunction with a target device or instrument that is remotely located from the computer and coupled to the computer through a network Software programs which perform data acquisition analysis and or presentation e g for measurement instru mentation control industrial automation or simulation such as in the applications shown in FIGS 1A and 1B may be referred to as virtual instruments Although the preferred embodiment of the invention is described with respect to measurement applications includ ing data acquisition generation analysis and or display and for controlling or modeling instrumentation or industrial automation hardware as noted above the present invention can be used for a plethora of applications and is not limited to measurement instrumentation or industrial automati
51. lurality of query blocks in the sequence US 7 134 081 B2 29 42 The instrumentation system of claim 40 wherein the task is configured to be exportable to other instrumentation systems 43 The instrumentation system of claim 40 wherein the task is a text based module configured for use in a textual programming environment 44 The instrumentation system of claim 40 wherein the task is a graphical object configured for use in a graphical programming environment 45 The instrumentation system of claim 26 wherein the response is displayed in a hexadecimal format 46 The instrumentation system of claim 26 wherein the response is displayed in an ASCII format 47 The instrumentation system of claim 26 wherein the message based instrument is a GPIB instrument 48 The instrumentation system of claim 26 wherein the message based instrument is a serial instrument 49 A computer readable memory medium comprising program instructions executable within an instrumentation system wherein the program instructions are executable to implement sending a query message to a message based instrument receiving a response from the message based instrument and parsing the response wherein said parsing comprises displaying the response graphically selecting a region of the displayed response in response to user input and specifying one or more attributes of the selected region wherein the selected region is configured in accor
52. may be able to choose between two or more numerical formats to display numerical data As illustrated in embodiments illustrated in FIGS 4 6 a HEX instrument response may be displayed in a response 20 25 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 18 field 211 of an exemplary instrument 1 assistant UI 200 as a series of HEX bytes separated by spaces As illustrated by the exemplary instrument assistant 200 in FIG 5 the user may hover over the instrument response and the mechanism may visually select the largest of a region 236 of the response e g a 1 2 4 or 8 byte region The region 236 may be calculated starting at the current mouse position in FIG 5 the cursor over the first 0 58 of the response and terminating either at the end of the instrument response or at the beginning of the next token A bounding rectangle color fill and or other indicator may be used to visually indicate the region 234 selected from the current hover position When a region is selected by hovering a tip strip 236 may be displayed above the selected region 234 showing the set of possible data types and the value of the selected region for the possible data types The data type may include data types that occupy the region and or smaller portions thereof The user may then select the data type for the region 234 from the tip strip 236 When the user specifies a token s data type the instru ment response may be graphicall
53. ment is controlled by writing a bit stream directly to registers in the instrument hardware The PXI PCI extension for Instrumentation bus is a platform for measurement systems promulgated by National Instruments Corporation The PXI bus is based on the computer PCI bus and includes various additional signal lines for instrumentation An instrumentation system using a data acquisition inter face method typically includes transducers that sense physi cal phenomena from the process or unit under test and provide electrical signals to data acquisition hardware inside the computer system The electrical signals generated by the transducers are converted into a form that the data acquisi tion board can accept typically by signal conditioning logic positioned between the transducers and the data acquisition card in the computer system The data acquisition card may then perform A D conversion on the received analog signals to generate corresponding digital signals These digital sig nals may then be analyzed or processed either by the DAQ card or by the computer system A computer may also control an instrumentation system through a serial bus such as the computer s serial or RS 232 port USB or IEEE 1394 Due to the wide variety of possible testing situations and environments and also the wide array of instruments avail able it is often necessary for a user to develop a program to control respective instruments in the desired instrumentat
54. ment to perform said sending said receiving and said parsing 36 The instrumentation system of claim 35 wherein said parsing during execution of the query block generates a parsed instrument response 37 The instrumentation system of claim 36 further comprising displaying the parsed instrument response 38 The instrumentation system of claim 36 further comprising providing the parsed instrument response to one or more other objects in the instrument control application program 39 The instrumentation system of claim 31 wherein the query block is configured to be exported to other instrumen tation systems 40 The instrumentation system of claim 26 wherein the program instructions are further executable to repeat said sending said receiving and said parsing for a plurality of query messages to the message based instrument generate a query block for each of the repetitions wherein the query block comprises program instructions that are executable to perform said sending said receiving and said parsing as specified for the particular repetition and add the plurality of generated query blocks for each of the repetitions to a task in the memory 41 The instrumentation system of claim 40 wherein the task comprises the plurality of query blocks in a sequence wherein the task is executable within the instrumentation system and wherein in said executing within the computer system the task is configured to execute the p
55. n icon e g a lens icon The command string may then be edited using this information so that the value is written correctly In one embodiment a similar IRPC interface may be used to specify a waveform for example to write the waveform to an ARB Embodiments of the instrument I O assistant parser mechanism may have functionality including but not lim ited to Data to be parsed may be either an ASCII string or binary data Parser may auto parse an input string if the input follows a known format The parser may accept a list of known format templates Parser may include a pre parse method which returns the best fit parse string Parser may parse an input sequence given a parse tem plate Parser may output a parsed sequence along with the data indices of the input stream which match the tokens in the output sequence and indices of the input template which generated each output token The parse templates may be modifiable by an interactive parser This means that the parse template may not have very many things in it that effect how the input sting is interpreted as a whole For example the user may be able to specify the endianness for each token in the input stream and there may not be many global speci fiers in the template Parser may be able to parse all or nearly all responses of known instruments Parser may be in a shared library Parser may work on a variety of platforms including but not limited to Win3
56. on applications In other words FIGS 1A and 1B are exem plary only and the present invention may be used in any of various types of systems Thus the system and method is operable for querying message based devices parsing the responses and generating code that encapsulates the con nection communication with the instrument and the parsing of the response for any of various types of applications 5 20 25 40 45 50 55 65 10 FIG 2 Computer System Block Diagram FIG 2 is a block diagram representing one embodiment of a computer system 102 shown in FIGS 1A or 1B It is noted that any type of computer system configuration or architecture can be used as desired and FIG 2 illustrates a representative PC embodiment It is also noted that the computer system may be a general purpose computer sys tem a computer implemented on a VXI card installed in a VXI chassis a computer implemented on a PXI card installed in a PXI chassis or other types of embodiments Elements of a computer not necessary to understand the present description have been omitted for simplicity The computer may include at least one central processing unit or CPU 160 that is coupled to a processor or host bus 162 The CPU 160 may be any of various types including an x86 processor e g a Pentium class a PowerPC proces sor a CPU from the SPARC family of RISC processors as well as others Main memory 166 is coupled to the host bus 162 by m
57. one embodiment the appear ance e g color and or pattern of the transparent lens icon may be used to specify the data type of the token as it is interpreted by the IRPC As the user scrolls through to parse the rest of the data in the response the data may maintain its highlighted color to indicate that it is tokenized In addition to the token lens icon the IRPC may include user interface items to toggle between binary e g Hexadecimal and ASCII data format big endian and little endian byte order ing and turning headers on off among others In one embodiment these toggles may apply to the entire instru ment response not individual values within the response a response may include multiple values For every token in the data response the user may be able to specify the data type to interpret the token a count to specify a sequence or array of values a delimiter for an array of values the data type that the instrument I O assistant may use to output the data scaling parameters for that token and a name for the output parameter The user may specify a sequence of values by connecting two values and specifying the terms of the sequence i e how many values are in the sequence how is it delimited etc Thus the instrument I O assistant may assume the same data type and scaling settings for all values in that sequence The IRPC may include a results box 215 that displays the output data that has been parsed The results box
58. other types of devices such as multimedia devices video devices audio devices telephony devices Internet devices etc FIG 1A illustrates an exemplary instrumentation control system 100 which may implement embodiments of the invention The system 100 comprises a host computer 102 which connects to one or more instruments The host com puter 102 may comprise a CPU a display screen memory and one or more input devices such as a mouse or keyboard as shown The computer 102 may operate with the one or more instruments to analyze measure or control a unit under test UUT or process 150 The one or more instruments may include message based instruments such as a GPIB instrument 112 and associated GPIB interface card 122 a serial instrument 182 and asso ciated serial interface card 184 and or one or more other message based instruments 118 and associated instrument cards not shown The host computer 102 may optionally also connect to other types of devices such as a data acquisition board and associated signal conditioning cir cuitry not shown a VXI instrument not shown a PXI instrument not shown a video device or camera and associated image acquisition or machine vision card not shown a motion control device and associated motion control interface card not shown and or one or more computer based instrument cards not shown a fieldbus device and associated fieldbus interface card not shown a PLC Programmable Logic
59. ows the user to initiate a scan for message based instruments In one embodiment the instrument I O assis tant UI 200 may provide a control 208 to insert a new instrument The user may select an instrument to which communication is desired using instrument display list con trol 206 In one embodiment the user may scroll through and select an instrument from a list of detected instruments or may otherwise specify a particular instrument to be communicated with for example by entering a VISA resource string In one embodiment the instrument I O assistant may utilize GPIB and or VISA MAX Measurement and Auto mation eXplorer providers in order to locate GPIB instru ments and find serial ports In one embodiment the instru ment I O assistant may configure the serial ports for the user by trying different permutations of serial settings such as bandwidth baud rate parity etc and sending out IDN queries until something valid is returned After scanning for GPIB instruments the instrument I P assistant may run a VISA resource expert and scan for all VISA message based instruments The instrument I O assistant UI 200 may display the list of detected instruments in instrument display list 206 The user may specify the target instrument for the command through the instrument display list 206 In one embodiment the instrument information may be gathered by enumerating a database e g an MXS database The user may be provided with the o
60. ption to re search for available instru ments for example by running an expert such as the GPIB and VISA resource experts When the instrument I O assis tant is invoked the list of instruments located in the database may be displayed in instrument display list 206 If the instrument desired is not in the list then the user may invoke the Scan for Instruments item 204 The experts e g GPIB and VISA resource experts may then populate the list with the newly found instruments In one embodiment the user may manually add an instrument using an optional Insert Instrument interface item 208 In one embodiment as an alternative to selecting a detected instrument from a list the user may be given the option of typing in a VISA resource string to specify an instrument FIG 14 is a flowchart illustrating a method of scanning for instruments according to one embodiment As indicated at 520 the method may first scan for message based instru ments coupled to the instrumentation system Scanning may detect at least a subset of the message based instruments coupled to the instrumentation system as indicated at 522 The user may select one of the detected message based instruments as indicated at 526 One or more query blocks for the selected instrument may then be generated in response to user input as indicated at 528 Each query block may be executable within the instrumentation system to connect with the selected message based instrument sen
61. r begins entering a command the command history may be searched and one or more commands matching the com mand string so far entered may be displayed The user may then select from the list of or more commands Alter natively an interface to the command history may be provided through which the user may specify or copy a previously entered command The command entry mechanism may assist the user with entering data in a format common to traditional instrumen tation The command entry mechanism may provide a method for the user to choose from standard data types and to specify endianness of data Big endian and little endian are terms that describe the order in which a sequence of bytes are stored in computer memory Big endian is an order in which the big end most significant value in the sequence is stored first at the lowest storage address Little endian is an order in which the little end least significant value in the sequence is stored first Endian ness may apply only to data in hexadecimal HEX format In one embodiment as illustrated in FIG 4 an exemplary instrument assistant UI 200 may provide a user interface item 217 to toggle between big endian and little endian when in HEX mode The command entry mechanism may also provide a method or methods to import data from CSV files or through an interactive Waveform Editor In one embodiment the instrument I O assistant may use the VISA C API
62. r later use in interfacing with message based instruments The results of the ASCII and or HEX token specification as described above may be used to automati cally create a text based e g C and or graphi cal code e g a LabVIEW graphical code object that can be included in a virtual instrument that may be used to programmatically perform the same functions as the instru ment I O assistant mechanism allowed the user to achieve interactively These functions may include communicating with an identified instrument sending command s to the identified instrument and reading back responses from the instrument and parsing the received response for display or for other uses among others The instrument assistant may provide the ability to create code to call and execute the saved configuration from a graphical language and or a text based language The saved code for one query and response may be referred to as a query block A user may use the instrument T O assistant to perform the above functions one or more times to generate a series of one or more query blocks which may be combined into a task The task may then be executed or alternatively code may be generated to execute the task In instrument control application programs such as Lab VIEW the instrument I O assistant mechanism may be accessed as graphical primitive that executes a saved con figuration The primitive takes the name of a saved configu ration tha
63. r the command by typing it in to a query field In one embodiment if the instrument I O assistant can determine the instrument type e g DMM scope arbitrary waveform arb function generator counter etc or alternatively if the user specifies the instrument type then syntax completion and suggestions for example according to the SCPI standard may be provided to the user In other words syntax completion and suggestions may appear as the user types in a command to the instrument In one embodiment instrument vendors and or third parties may provide a file for a specific instrument that describes the command syntax of the instrument This file may then be used by the instrument I O assistant in providing syntax information to the user If such a file exists then the standard SCPI syntax completion may be replaced with syntax completion based on the custom file After entering the command the user may select a user interface item to cause the command to be sent the instrument As indicated at 306 the instrument I O assistant may receive a response from the instrument after the command is sent The response from the instrument may comprise instru ment data represented as a binary or ASCII string In one embodiment the user may have the option of toggling the representation of the response data between binary and ASCII representations Data in ASCII representation may comprise a sequence of strings and the user may specify a delimiter
64. r window may automatically appear in the case of an error or option ally the user may bring it up by selecting it from a menu or through another user interface item In one embodiment the instrument I O assistant may include bus and API call monitoring tools that operate similarly to the error return control FIG 3 Exemplary I O Scriptor User Interface FIG 3 illustrates an exemplary instrument assistant User Interface UI 200 according to one embodiment The instrument I O assistant UI 200 may include one or more tabs or windows for performing the various functions of the instrument I O assistant Using the UI 200 or more query blocks may be created and saved into a task or task list for example by using an Apply UI item to add a query block and a Redo item to repeat a query block The user may execute the task list by selecting the Run user interface item 202 to view the results of executing the one or more query blocks in the current task Identifying One or More Instruments As illustrated in FIG 3 the instrument I O assistant UI 200 may provide user interface elements for discovering US 7 134 081 B2 13 identifying specifying and entering message based instru ments The instrument I O assistant may automatically scan for message based instruments coupled to the system 102 within which the instrument I O assistant is executing The instrument I O assistant UI 200 may provide a control 204 that all
65. rol systems an instrument of each interface type may not be present and in fact many systems may only have one or more instruments of a single interface type such as only GPIB instruments The instruments may be coupled to a unit under test UUT or process 150 or may be coupled to receive field signals typically generated by transducers or sensors The system 100 may be used in a data acquisition and control application in a test and measurement application an image processing or machine vision application a process control application a man machine interface application a simula tion application or a hardware in the loop validation appli cation FIG 1B illustrates an exemplary industrial automation system 160 that may implement embodiments of the inven tion The industrial automation system 160 is similar to the instrumentation or test and measurement system 100 shown in FIG 1A Elements which are similar or identical to elements in FIG 1A have the same reference numerals for convenience The system 160 may comprise a computer 102 that connects to one or more devices or instruments The computer 102 may comprise a CPU a display screen memory and one or more input devices such as a mouse or keyboard as shown The computer 102 may operate with the one or more devices to a process or device 150 to perform an automation function such as MMI Man Machine Inter face SCADA Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition portable or
66. rse the response the program instructions are further executable to display the response graphically select one or more regions of the displayed response in response to user input specify one or more attributes for each selected region and configure each selected region as a token in accordance with the specified one or more attributes of the particular selected region 27 The instrumentation system of claim 26 wherein the specified one or more attributes of each selected region include one or more of data type byte ordering position size count name and scaling 28 The instrumentation system of claim 26 wherein the program instructions are further executable to specify the message based instrument to receive the query message in response to user input 29 The instrumentation system of claim 28 wherein to specify the message based instrument the program instruc tions are further executable to select the message based instrument from a list of two or more instruments coupled to the instrumentation system in response to user input 30 The instrumentation system of claim 26 wherein the message based instrument is one of one or more message based instruments coupled to the computing device 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 28 wherein prior to said sending the query message the program instructions are further executable to detect the message based instrument coupled to the device 31 T
67. scaling parameters for that token and a name for the output parameter among other characteristics The results of the graphical token specification as described above may be used to automatically create text based code e g C C NET and or graphical code e g a LabVIEW graphical code object that can be included in a virtual instrument that may be used to programmatically perform the same functions as were performed interactively by the user These functions may include communicating with an identified instrument sending command s to the identified instrument reading back responses from the instrument and parsing the received response for display or for other uses among others Code may also be generated to call and execute the saved configuration from a graphical language and or a text based language The saved code for one query and response may be referred to as a query block The user may perform the above functions two or more times to generate a series of two or more query blocks which may be combined into a task The task may then be executed or alternatively code may be generated to execute the task In one embodiment a plurality of query blocks may be generated in response to user input Each query block may be executable within an instrumentation system to connect with a message based instrument send a query message to the message based instrument receive a response to the query message from the message based instrum
68. se may be automatically pre parsed Using parsing for example instead of a string of ASCII characters and binary numbers the user will see the actual number s corresponding to a voltage reading If the pre parsing does not interpret the instrument response cor rectly then the user may interactively vary how the response string is parsed Characteristics associated with instrument command strings and response strings that the user may set or change in order to define the desired command response include but are not limited to data type binary text format endianness tokens sequences scaling output data wave forms etc and headers on off one embodiment the user may position and or size an icon e g a transparently colored icon e g a lens that spans over a portion of the response data and highlights it The data underneath the lens icon is set apart as a token In one embodiment the appearance e g color and or texture of the transparent lens icon may be used to specify the data type of the token As the user scrolls through to parse the rest of the data in the response the data may maintain its high lighted appearance e g color to indicate that it is token ized For every token in the data response the user may be able to specify the data type to interpret the token a count to specify a sequence or array of values a delimiter for an array of values the data type that may be used to output the data
69. sing the Ul 518 Fig 13 U S Patent Nov 7 2006 Sheet 14 of 14 US 7 134 081 B2 Scan for instruments 520 Detect one or more instrumenis 522 Select an instrument 526 Generate one or more query blocks for the selected instrument 528 Fig 14 US 7 134 081 B2 1 METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CONTROLLING AN INSTRUMENTATION SYSTEM PRIORITY CLAIM This application claims benefit of priority of U S provi sional application Ser No 60 312 257 titled Method and Apparatus for Controlling an Instrumentation System filed Aug 14 2001 whose inventors are David W Fuller III Christopher G Cifra and Thomas V Connell Jr FIELD OF THE INVENTION The present invention relates to I O control software for instrumentation systems and more particularly to a system and method for querying message based instruments pars ing the responses and generating code that encapsulates the connection communication with the instrument and the parsing of the response DESCRIPTION OF THE RELATED ART An instrument is a device that collects data or information from an environment or unit under test and displays this information to a user An instrument may also perform various data analysis and data processing on acquired data prior to displaying the data to the user Examples of various types of instruments include oscilloscopes digital multim eters pressure sensors temperature sensors machine vision systems e g cameras
70. sistant may provide an instrument centric approach to message based instrument The instrument I O assistant may assist the user in parsing one or more instrument responses by offering an environment that enables a user to interact with an instru ment response without forcing the user to write parsing code A method may also be provided to make tasks created using the instrument I O assistant persistent so that they may be reused and distributed if desired Embodiments of the instrument I O assistant may be integrated into one or more high level application programs for instrumentation control such as LabVIEW and Lab Win dows CVI from National Instruments Corp among others to make instrument I O as transparent as possible The instrument I O assistant may also provide code generation so that the task created in instrument I O assistant can be reused in one or more instrument control application programs Embodiments of the instrument I O assistant may provide mechanisms to perform several functions including but not limited to US 7 134 081 B2 a mechanism for identifying one or more instruments for communication a mechanism for entering and sending command s to an identified instrument a mechanism for reading back responses from the instru ment parsing a received response and displaying the parsed response and a mechanism for creating and saving program code e g text based or graphical e g Lab VIEW code t
71. sk Input s and output s of the task object may also be linked with one or more other objects in the program When the program is later executed the task may execute to send the series of one or more commands queries to the identified instrument read the instrument response s and parse the instrument responses in accordance with the parsing information saved in the query blocks The parsed instrument responses may then be displayed and or input to other objects in the program As mentioned above the instrument I O assistant may provide a graphical user interface window through which the various functions of the instrument I O assistant may be performed under user control In one embodiment there may be one main view or user interface UI One embodi ment of such a UI is illustrated in FIG 3 From this UI the user may select the instrument with which to communicate The collection of controls of the instrument I O assistant UI 200 that allow the user to manipulate how an instrument response is parsed may be referred to as the instrument response parser control In one embodiment the IRPC varies depending on whether the response is ASCII or HEX format The user may toggle this feature This UL may include special highlighting and hover features so that the user can interact and modify the manner in which the control parses the data The IRPC may have one or more user interface items that may be manipulated by the user to parse
72. strumentation system in response to user input 6 The method of claim 1 further comprising generating a query block in response to said parsing wherein the query block comprises program instruc tions that are executable to perform said sending said receiving and said parsing and storing the generated query block to memory 7 The method of claim 6 wherein the query block is executable within the instrumentation system to interact with the selected message based instrument to perform said sending said receiving and said parsing 8 The method of claim 6 wherein the query block is a graphical object configured for use in a graphical program ming environment 9 The method of claim 6 wherein the query block is a text based module configured for use in a textual program ming environment 10 The method of claim 6 further comprising adding the query block to an instrument control applica tion program executing the instrument control application program and executing the query block within the instrument control application program to interact with the selected mes sage based instrument to perform said sending said receiving and said parsing 11 The method of claim 6 wherein said parsing generates one or more parsed instrument responses 12 The method of claim 11 further comprising display ing at least a subset of the parsed instrument responses 13 The method of claim 11 further comprising providing at le
73. t can change its set of outputs based on the outputs that the saved configuration generates In instrument control application programs such as LabVIEW the instrument I O assistant mechanism may be accessed as a block that brings up an instrument I O assistant wizard and automati cally generates the code e g LabVIEW code from instru ment I O assistant into the block 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 20 FIG 9 Flowchart FIG 9 is a flowchart of a method of querying message based instruments parsing the responses and generating code that encapsulates the connection communication with the instrument and the parsing of the response according to one embodiment As indicated at 300 one or more message based instruments connected to a system may be detected The instrument I O assistant may automatically scan for message based instruments coupled to the system within which the instrument I O assistant is executing The instru ment I O assistant UI may provide a control that allows the user to initiate a scan for message based instruments As indicated at 302 the user may scroll through and select an instrument from a list of detected instruments or may otherwise specify a particular instrument to be communi cated with for example by entering a VISA resource string As indicated at 304 the user may then enter a command e g query to send to the selected instrument In one embodiment the user may ente
74. toggled on and 10 0 when headers are toggled off If the parser assumes headers are off but they are really on then the parser may have problems parsing the data correctly The user may be able to toggle this option if the parser is making a false assumption In one embodiment the instrument I O assistant may automatically determine some of these characteristics For 5 40 45 55 65 16 example the instrument I O assistant may query the instru ment to determine if headers are turned on or off However since errors may occur during automatic detection of one or more of the characteristics or the user may desire to override an automatically determined characteristic the instrument I O assistant may provide a mechanism for the user to manually set the characteristics The collection of controls of the instrument I O assistant UI 200 that allows the user to manipulate how an instrument response is parsed may be referred to as the instrument response parser control IRPC In one embodiment the system may provide the user with the capabilities to graphically parse the instrument response In one embodiment the user may position an icon over a portion of the response data to select the portion of the response data For example the user may size a transpar ently colored lens icon that spans over a portion of the response data and highlights it The data underneath the lens icon is set apart as a token In
75. tomatically scan for message based instruments coupled to the system A user interface UI may be provided that allows the user to initiate a scan for message based instruments The user may scroll through and select an instrument from a list of detected instruments or may otherwise specify a particular instrument to be communicated with The user may then enter a command e g query to send to the selected instrument In one embodiment the user may enter the command by typing it in to a query field In one embodiment if the instrument type can be determined e g DMM scope arbitrary waveform arb function generator counter etc or alternatively if the user specifies the instru ment type then syntax completion and suggestions for example according to the SCPI standard may be provided to the user In one embodiment instrument vendors and or third parties may provide a file for a specific instrument that describes the command syntax of the instrument This file may then be used in providing syntax information to the user If such a file exists then the standard SCPI syntax completion may be replaced with syntax completion based on the custom file After entering the command the user may select a user interface item to cause the command to be sent the instrument response may be received from the instrument after the command is sent The received response may then be parsed US 7 134 081 B2 5 In one embodiment the respon
76. unt value When the user specifies a count that evaluates to a number greater than one the instrument response string is graphically annotated to show the individual elements of the set connected together The user may remove the specification for a token To accomplish this for example the user may select the token and press the delete or backspace key Other methods may be used to remove the specification for a token One embodiment may provide the user with the ability to slide the token specification a byte at a time over the instrument response 211 within the available space When sliding the token a tip strip 236 may slide along with it The tip strip 236 may display the set of possible data types and the value of the current region for the possible data types One embodiment may provide the user with the ability to resize a string token This may be accomplished for example by allowing the user to grab the edge of a string token s bounding rectangle and enlarge or shrink the rect angle a byte at a time bounded by the available space The minimum size of a string token is one character US 7 134 081 B2 19 ASCII Mode FIGS 3 7 and 8 illustrate embodiments of an exemplary instrument I O assistant 200 in ASCII mode ASCH mode may be used to find and select alphanumeric strings and numbers in an instrument response In ASCII mode the user may select an area of the instrument response 211 and it is automatically interprete
77. ustrating a method of generating a task object and graphically editing the generated task object according to one embodiment As indicated at 510 a task object may be generated in response to user input The user may then graphically add the task object to an instru ment control application program as indicated at 512 As indicated at 514 the user may invoke a user interface for graphically editing the task object The user may then graphically generate one or more query blocks using the user interface as indicated at 516 Each query block may be executable within an instrumentation system to connect with a message based instrument send a query message to the message based instrument receive a response to the query message from the message based instrument parse the response and output results of said parsing the response As indicated at 518 the user may then graphically add the one or more query blocks to the task object NI GPIB and NI VISA for example both offer tools for reporting errors descriptively and monitoring the bus and API calls These tools include but are not limited to NI Spy GPIB Analyzer and the error reporting in VISAIC In one embodiment the instrument I O assistant may include tools that utilize these technologies and incorporate them into a single application In one embodiment the technologies may be provided as separate tabs in the instrument assistant The instrument I O assistant workshop may maintain
78. y annotated to show the selected token 230 as illustrated by the exemplary instru ment assistant UI 200 in FIG 6 In one embodiment this may be done with a bounding rectangle and or color fill that represents the data type Other methods may be used to graphically annotate the selected token 230 Note that one or more attributes 218 of the selected token may be displayed The user may specify the count of a selected token using the count control field 220 as illustrated by the exemplary instrument assistant UI 200 in FIG 4 In embodi ment the count for tokens of the string type may not be specified If the count is greater than one then the token is interpreted as a contiguous set of values of a particular size and type starting at the selected token e g an array Once the user has specified a token as an array that is a count greater than 1 then the user may have the option to collapse the token so that all of the elements of the array appear as one token element In one embodiment the count control field 220 defaults to 1 In one embodiment the control 220 may present other options such as the amount of available space divided by the size of the currently selected token In one embodiment the count may be set to the value of a named token that was previously specified by the user and that precedes the selected token When the count is set to a named token the mechanism uses the value of the named token as the co

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