Developing a Stimulating and Monitoring System Using NI LabVIEW

"The stimulation and monitoring system is a flexible, real-time system that provides cost-effective, high-performance aid to both the characterisation and emulation of black box systems."
- S. Mitchell, Systems Engineering & Assessment Ltd.

The Challenge:
Providing continuous high-speed and high-resolution waveform reproduction and sampling to accurately characterize black box systems.

The Solution:
Creating an equipment tester that incorporates high-precision PCI boards from NI driven by a sophisticated environment managed by LabVIEW software.

For system control, we implemented a set of LabVIEW VIs.

Author(s): S. Mitchell - Systems Engineering & Assessment Ltd. We developed a flexible real-time stimulation and acquisition tool to provide users with a cost-effective, high-performance system to characterise and emulate black box systems. A black box system refers to an undefined function/operation on a box system, which is a type of electronic equipment, system, or sensor. The operation/function may not be easily understood because the information is not available, the box is not performing properly, or it is a competitors box. Characterisation and emulation means the user may have a system that he or she wishes to characterise. The equipment can stimulate known, either measured or modeled, characteristics of a system or subsystem and simultaneously record the response results of the system under test. We can analyse these results with the prompting stimulus to establish the relationships between the stimulus and the response. We can use this information to modify the behaviour of the system under test, identify problems in a test scenario, or design systems that benefit from detailed knowledge about the behaviour of a sealed or alien system.

Stimulator Design
The core of the stimulation and monitoring system is a PC-based, fully automated test system running LabVIEW. The stimulation and acquisition elements, which provide the required accuracy and data rates, include four NI PCI-4452 four-channel 16-bit acquisition boards with programmable antialiasing, and four NI PCI-6111 two-channel 16-bit analogue-output boards . We applied additional conditioning to the inputs and outputs for optimum system performance, and the 16-bit attenuator on the outputs provided an overall dynamic range of 190 dB. For system control, we implemented a set of LabVIEW VIs. The user can employ these to build a bespoke application, which uses the supplied modular blocks that control and interface to all elements, or to run the stimulation and monitoring system standard VIs that reproduce stored data and acquire input data and preselectable data rates. Key features to the overall performance include the dual 550 MHz Intel Pentium III processors and the 3 by 18 GB removable fast-disk drives, which provide the input, output, and control data. These removable drives also provide ease of data insertion and security removal if necessary.

Applications
Typical applications for the stimulation and monitoring system include black box characterization; system functional and performance testing; development aid for system or artificial intelligence tailoring; production spread recording or testing; system recording for playback, event or occurrence recording; and arbitrary waveform generation and response capture.

Stimulator Configuration
The stimulator uses eight 16-bit digital-to-analogue converter channels, each followed by a 16-bit attenuator and differential amplifier. This configuration permits a stimulation range of 10 V (20 V differential) full scale to 150 mV (300 mV differential) full scale at 16-bit resolution, independently adjustable for each channel. The differential output amplifier ensures signal balance for optimum analogue performance using twisted screened test cables. This configuration also implements the use of single-ended outputs of either polarity with a return of 0 V. Sixteen 16-bit high-input impedance acquisition inputs capture the response of the system under test. The system records these sample inputs simultaneously for later analysis. We can individually select data rates for each channel to optimise results storage ensuring that we use the most favourable bandwidth for the signal in question. Actual sampling performs at the least-common multiple-sample rate ensuring the highest timing integrity. Digital filtering provides the required data sets with the demanded bandwidth. In addition, we can record digital inputs. With the control system LabVIEW VIs, we can rapidly retrieve the stimulation information from disk to provide real-time waveform generation and simultaneous data acquisition. Standard storage includes 18 GB of stimulation data and 18 GB of acquisition. However, we can easily increase this by using larger disk capacities or adding disks to the spare removable disk bays. Additionally, 16 uncommitted digital I/O signals supply the equipment we use for synchronously inputting or outputting control or status information.

Design Challenges
Maintaining high data rates, high precision, and low noise were among the biggest challenges for the equipment design. The selection of seamlessly integrated commercial off-the-shelf components drove the design toward NI data acquisition devices controlled by LabVIEW. This, coupled with the Dell RAID disk module used as independently accessed and high data rate disks controlled by a Dell high-performance computer, provided the integrated compatibility required to add the necessary throughput to the system performance. With our new equipment tester we can postprocess the sampled, filtered results with the influence waveforms to establish the characteristics and performance of the system under test. The stimulation and monitoring system is a flexible, real-time system that provides cost-effective, high-performance aid to both the characterisation and emulation of black box systems. Using the performance and software support drivers of LabVIEW, we were able to develop the solution at the right price. Author Information: S. Mitchell Systems Engineering & Assessment Ltd.

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For system control, we implemented a set of LabVIEW VIs.

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