PC-based trolley test instrument

Author

Barkand, Thomas D.

Author_Institution

US Dept. of Labor, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

fYear

1989

fDate

1-5 Oct. 1989

Firstpage

1572

Abstract

The author describes the design of a trolley test instrument based on an IBM-XT-compatible, single-board computer and plug-in A/D (analog/digital) converter card. The CMOS technology used for the single-board computer reduces the power consumption from the portable battery pack. The operating system and computational algorithm were burned into EPROM (electrically programmable ROM) to eliminate the disk drive and provide rugged nonvolatile program execution. The trolley tester collects the voltage and current parameters during trolley surveys and then calculates the available fault current, time constant, and appropriate circuit-breaker settings. The hardware design, software coding, and laboratory testing of the instrument are discussed. A simplified method for burning the operating system and computational algorithm into EPROM is shown.<>

Keywords

automatic test equipment; computerised instrumentation; electric current measurement; microcomputer applications; voltage measurement; CMOS technology; EPROM; IBM-XT-compatible single-board computer; PC-based trolley test instrument; appropriate circuit-breaker settings; available fault current; computational algorithm; current measurement; operating system; plug-in A/D convertor card; rugged nonvolatile program execution; software coding; time constant; voltage measurement; Analog computers; Analog-digital conversion; Batteries; CMOS technology; Circuit testing; EPROM; Energy consumption; Instruments; Operating systems; Portable computers;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Industry Applications Society Annual Meeting, 1989., Conference Record of the 1989 IEEE

Conference_Location

San Diego, CA, USA

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IAS.1989.96852

Filename

96852