ADwin-Gold II
, Manual February 2013
3
ADwin system concept
ADwin
Communication between
ADwin
system and PC
Interfaces
The
ADwin
system is connected to the PC via an
Ethernet
interface. After power-up
the
ADwin
system is booted from the PC via this interface. Afterwards the
ADwin
oper-
ating system is waiting for instructions from the PC which it will process.
Instruction processing
There are two kinds of instructions: On the one hand instructions, which transfer data
from the PC to the
ADwin
system, for instance "start process" or "set parameter", on
the other hand instructions which wait for a response from the
ADwin
system, for
instance "read variables" or "read data sets". Both kinds of instructions are processed
immediately by the
ADwin
system, which means immediate and complete responses.
The
ADwin
system never sends data to the PC without request! The data transfer to
the PC is always a response to an instruction coming from the PC. Thus, embedding
the
ADwin
system into various programming languages and standard software pack-
ages for measurements is held simple, because they have only to be able to call func-
tions and process the return value.
Software interfaces
Under Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000/XP/Vista you can use a
DLL
and an
ActiveX
inter-
face. On this basis the following drivers for
development environments
are available:
.NET, Visual Basic, Visual-C, C/C++, Delphi, VBA (Excel, Access, Word), TestPoint,
LabVIEW / LabWINDOWS, Agilent VEE (HP-VEE), InTouch, DIAdem, DASYLab,
SciLab, MATLAB.
Versions for Linux, Mac OS and Java are available, too.
The simple, instruction-oriented communication with the
ADwin
system enables sev-
eral Windows programs to access the same
ADwin
system in coordination at the same
time. This is of course a great advantage when programs are being developed and
installed.
Fig. 1 – Concept of the
ADwin
systems
