- Posted on: 2020-11-04
We already blogged about the importance of having deterministic code execution in order to generate repeatable and reliable test results. It is also a common topic inside our case studies and for a good reason. Take, for example, a slow (~1 second) communication with the temperature chamber controller. If it interferes with sending commands to your Device Under Test (DUT) every 100ms, then your Automated Test System (ATS) will report a failure/problem with the DUT that is really the fault of the ATS. Your engineers may then investigate something entirely irrelevant for days.
Beyond that basic case that demonstrates the importance of using parallel processing approach, you need very efficient ways of communicating information between those different tasks. In Symplify, we use mostly Tags so we ran a simple test to verify the performance of Symplify in the most challenging situations:
- 3,000+ Tags
- All Tags logged to disk at 10Hz (TDMS)
- 10 “Drivers” each
- Reading all 3,000 tags 20 times per second
- Writing new values to 100 of those Tags
- 1 DAQ driver with 16 channels acquiring 50kS/s/ch
The results surprised our own team with a performance well above our expectations on a simple laptop computer. Moreover, logging all the data (16x50kS/s) to disk with Symplify data logging had no impact on CPU.
Watch the video here:
If you are interested to know more about high performance application, we also ran multiple tests on Real-Time target (NI cRIO 9037) for closed loop control at 1ms. Those videos can be found in our video gallery here:
Contact us if you want to discuss how painful your troubleshooting activities are and wish to reduce those costs and delays.