What is ATEasy

ATEasy is a rapid application development framework for electronics functional test, ATE, data acquisition, process control, and instrumentation systems. ATEasy provides tools to develop and maintain software components, including test programs, user interface (forms), and instrument drivers. The development environment provides a framework that resembles a real test system objects and provide placeholders to the test engineer to develop these software components.
ATEasy is an open architecture environment and provides access to test & measurement industry standards including GPIB, VXI, PCI, Serial Communication, DLL, ActiveX, .NET assemblies, HTML, VXI Plug&Play Functions Panel drivers, IVI drivers, LabView VI, C Header.

History of ATEasy

ATEasy v1.0 first introduced in July 1991 by Geotest (developed initially by Ron Yazma) and was running on Windows 3.0. Version 3.0 was the first 32 bit version (released 1996). Version 6.0 was released on October 2006.

The ATEasy Integrated Development Environment

The Integrated development environment implements RAD Rapid Application Development environment using the built in [Just-in -time compilation] compiler similar to the one found in Java . This results in short development cycles allowing the user to make a change in the code and test it without a long edit-compile-link-debug cycle. Once the development is done the development environment can create an executable (EXE file) that can be distributed with the ATEasy run-time engine (similar to Visual Basic). The IDE displays the framework in a tree like structure that shows the various project files (Program, System and Driver) and their components (Forms, Commands, Tests, Procedures, Types, Libraries, Events, IOTables).

The ATEasy Programming Language

ATEasy programming language is similar to Microsoft Visual Basic and support event programming. However, the language has extensions and predefined classes that correspond to a test system. This includes ASystem (test system), ADriver (test instrument driver), AProgram (test program), ATest (test) and more. The language allows the user to create user defined driver, system and program statements that look like the following code:

<code>
DMM Set Function VDC ! driver command single instrument<br />
System Connect VDC to J1-30 ! system command , uses many instrument to implement<br />
DMM Measure (TestResult) ! measure is store to TestResult variable)<br />
</code>

The language contains statements such as if-then-else, select-case, loop, try-catch, etc. It supports features such as multi-threading, events, interrupts as in other used modern programming languages. The internal library contains functions as string manipulation, math, file I/O, PC resources, GPIB, VXI, serial communication etc. To extend the internal library procedures and classes, you can import and use ActiveX controls or objects, .NET assemblies and DLLs.

The ATEasy Test Executive

The ATEasy test executive is a driver (TestExec.drv) that is plugged to the system files. The test executive provides a customized user interface to the end user (tester) and lets him run, debug, log results of the test programs. The Test Executive integrates with the Fault Analysis module (FaultAnalysis.drv) that analyzes at the end of the run the test results to provide suggestion to the operator what to replace in the faulty UUT in case the program test(s) failed.

References

Geotest/ATEasy - Geotest web site describing ATEasy<br />
Getting Started Manual - ATEasy v6.0 Getting Started Manual (PDF)<br />
ATEasy Help File - ATEasy Help File (CHM)<br />
ATEasy Test Executive Help File - ATEasy Test Executive Help File (CHM)<br />

Alternatives

Visual Studio <br />
LabView<br />
Agilent VEE<br />

See also

PXI
GPIB
VXI
RS-232
Data acquisition
.NET Framework
ActiveX