Integrating VISA, IVI and ATEasy to migrate legacy test systems

New software technologies, such as VISA and IVI, continue to bring the industry toward greater standardization. The benefit to the integrator is reduced costs through reuse of the same hardware and software. The benefit to the customer end-user is lower costs by reducing modification and support through the life-cycle to the test station. However, while we position ourselves for the future with PXI and these software technologies, we must still provide support for VXI, GPIB, and instrument drivers that use current software technologies. Using a number of additional tools such as National Instrument's Measurement and Automation Explorer and Geotest's ATEasy, we can have the power of these tools today while waiting for wider acceptance and support of the newer VISA and IVI technologies. We are just now seeing the development of IVI drivers and the ink is still wet on the VISA specification for PXI. ATEasy provided the structure necessary to use these technologies with the current technology. This paper explores the process of implementing and integrating the system driver and instrument drivers for a PXI-based test station for the TOW2 Optical Sight Sensor.