TOOLKIT: Prototyping on the Web
Fernando Zubillaga-Elorza, Charles R. Allen · 1999
The Web’s role in the product development life cycle has thus far focused primarily on distributing end products to end users. At the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, however, we have worked with UK-based instrument manufacturers Seaward Electronics of Peterlee to develop a set of Java-based, object-oriented, electronic design automation (EDA) tools to support the design and evaluation of new electronic instruments. The tools can be used to model and simulate conceptual designs with which users can interact through a Web browser. The feedback from this interaction can be used to refine the design specification early in the product life cycle. Changes can thus be made very quickly without expensive software revisions to instrument firmware, circuit board designs, or casings. We have used this virtual instrument toolkit to model and simulate a conceptual instrument, called a Portable Appliance Tester (PAT), which is designed to perform a set of electrical safety tests on a sample appliance. The tester is coded in HTML and available over the Web at http://www.student.ncl.ac.uk/fernando.zubillaga-elorza/. In this article, we describe the virtual instrument toolkit and its use in the design of the tester. THE TOOLKIT The virtual instrument toolkit is easy to program. It allows a designer to define events and conditions as they happen in a manner very similar to working with graphical Windows-based macros where, rather than writing program code, the user records a series of windowing actions, such as opening an application, typing some text, and so on. The sequence is stored, and the actions can be repeated with a single keystroke. Similarly, a programmer can use the toolkit’s Finite State Machine (FSM) methodology to set up conditions (instrument states) visually and define events that will change those condi