
ADwin-Gold
USB / ENET, manual version 3.8, October 2005
3
System description
ADwin
Communication between
ADwin
system and PC
Interfaces
The
ADwin
system is connected to the PC via an
USB or Ethernet
interface.
After power-up the
ADwin
system is booted from the PC via this interface.
Afterwards the
ADwin
operating 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 trans-
fer data from the PC to the
ADwin
system, for instance "load process", "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
sys-
tem, which means immediate and full range responds. 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
packages for measurements is easily made, because they have only to be able
to call functions and process the return value.
Software interfaces
Under Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000/XP you can use a
DLL
and an
ActiveX
interface. 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, DIA-
dem, MATLAB.
The easy, instruction-oriented communication with the
ADwin
system enables
several Windows programs to access the same
ADwin
system in coordination
at the same time. This is of course a great advantage when programs are devel-
oped and installed.
Fig. 1 – Concept of the
ADwin
systems