Development of Interchangeable Virtual Instrument driver for Cannon-Chamber Test Instrument

The driver development is important for the program-controlled instruments. The purpose of this paper is to introduce how to develop the drivers, which can realize the aim of interchangeability the same type of instrumentation without replacing the drivers, so the application layer can call it conveniently. The drivers are developed under the Interchangeable Virtual Instrument standards, which is IVI-COM, which describe a flexible architecture for developing the interchangeable instrument drivers. But the interface realization specification between the interchangeable virtual instrument driver and upper test program is not given. Aiming at this problem, using Component Object Model to develop this interface is presented on this paper. At the same time, the software is classified as application layer, instrument driven layer and Input/output layer. Finally the programming method under Visual Basic environment is given. The application program about the Cannon-Chamber Test Instrument is easy to maintain and update because layered architecture and COM components is used.