Custom Architecture Templates: one solution for many problems

Have you ever had so many projects and too little time available? Would you like to have a solution that you can reuse in the future? If the answer is “yes!”, you should be familiar with terms like “Design Pattern”, “Framework” and “Architecture Template”.

A Design Pattern is an approach to solve a recurring problem that helps the programmer to develop a particular algorithm, like FGV or State Machines.

A Framework is something more complete than a Design Pattern and it is a set of functionalities already developed and tested that the programmer can use to approach the development of an entire program.

The advantages are amazing: re-usability, modularity and code reliability of a project with a significant acceleration of the development and validation phases.

Info Solution is NI Alliance Partner and our team manages and develops a lot of projects at the same time. In the Test System business unit, all our projects involve NI LabVIEW, NI TestStand and NI products, so mixing design pattern and part of different frameworks we have developed our custom architecture templates.

We have developed our own architecture template that fit perfectly with typical projects that we develop for our customers. We have identified three kind of templates. The first one is a project with LabVIEW RT and LabVIEW FPGA for supervisor and control systems. The Second one is for ATE based on a custom UI and TestStand engine integration with modules that we can easily reuse and mix together. The last one is useful for the Host PC layer of custom test manager programs fully developed in LabVIEW.

Every HW layer has his own characteristics, let’s think about the different development approach between RT and FPGA. Anyway, we are always improving and upgrading our architecture templates.

Regarding the Host PC code development, we are working with custom templates including OOP and we have used for some projects the DQMH framework integrated on our architecture.

Finally, we can say that development time, validation time, test report editing for quality checks and team working are advantages that arise from this standardized and organized approach and this is a benefit for our customers in terms of time and costs”.