An Alternate Control Scheme for Reconfigurable Virtual Instruments

Abstract

The widespread usage of personal computers in many scientific and technological fields makes them an ideal hardware and software platform for the implementation of measurement instruments. Reconfigurable virtual instruments are implemented using a universal general purpose reconfigurable hardware whose functionality is defined by the measurement requirement. It is a versatile hardware device that can be reconfigured into different electronic instruments using a software tool. A high-level software application runs on the PC and provides a user interface to the operator who can select a virtual instrument (e.g. digital oscilloscope, arbitrary waveform generator, logic analyzer, digital filter?) from a library of instruments and configures the RVI system to convert it into the selected instrument with its associated console. The speech recognition interface enhances the ability of the operator to control various system components without manually navigating the graphical user interface (GUI). Several options were considered during the analysis but only one option proved to be optimal. The solution described in this paper uses the NXP semiconductors ARMLPC2148 microcontroller to handle all speech recognition calculations. The GUI control system runs on the main PC processor and the controlled instruments are attached to the system through RS232 interface. Speech recognition performance analysis is done for both PC based approach and dedicated hardware based approach in terms of realizing and controlling the VIs and the results are compared.