Acqiris Overcomes the Challenges of IVI Development
"The high level of support offered by Pacific MindWorks turns an already great product
into an outstanding one," Yves Maumary, Manager of Software Development, Acqiris.
While open standards-based IVI drivers are a boon to the users of sophisticated
instruments, even the savviest driver development engineer finds them a challenge
to build.
Slipped schedules and misinterpretation of the standard's requirements are the frequent
outcome of "go-it-alone" IVI development efforts. The team at Acqiris, a leading
developer of high-speed digitizer technology, was determined to avoid these pitfalls.
To reach its goals, Acqiris sought out the best tools to avoid problems arising
from the inherent complexities of IVI development.
Giving Diligence Its Due
"Selecting an IVI development tool was a job we took very seriously," said Yves
Maumary, Acqiris' Manager of Software Development. "Initial research turned up two
vendors that met our selection criteria."
"As hands-on experience was the goal, we requested evaluation copies and set to
work. The first tool we looked at had only a 'limited' functionality in the evaluation
product, making the assessment of its suitability for our specific needs more difficult."
Acqiris soon turned its attention to evaluating Nimbus from Pacific MindWorks. "Unlike
our first experience, the evaluation copy of Nimbus was fully functional from the
start."
The clean Nimbus design immediately impressed Acqiris. "Nimbus was so easy to use.
Its seamless integration with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET greatly reduced the learning
curve. Since we were already comfortable with the IDE, building a test driver was
a snap."
Stellar Support
Although nine time zones apart, Acqiris found Pacific MindWorks a most responsive
partner. "Any questions we had were answered overnight. One of the first challenges
was how to more closely couple the IVI driver with our hardware-we needed to bypass
standard IVI protocols and call the instrument driver directly (the IVI driver and
instrument are on the same machine). Pacific MindWorks walked us through the solution
and even modified Nimbus to better support this requirement.
"We also wanted users to have a consistent API regardless of the underlying capabilities
of the instrument (so multiple physical instruments could be combined into a single
virtual instrument). This required the IVI driver to query the instrument's capabilities
during initialization and dynamically configure itself based on the number of channels
available. Pacific MindWorks showed us how to override IVI driver initialization
methods by replacing Nimbus-generated templates with our code. The driver Nimbus
generates is modular and easy to modify.
"Since this project was our first substantial experience using Microsoft COM/ATL
technologies, it could have been much more difficult than it turned out to be. Pacific
MindWorks guided us through all the steps necessary to succeed. We communicated
via email and telephone. We even jointly debugged some tricky problems over Live
Meeting. The high level of support offered by Pacific MindWorks turns an already
great product into an outstanding one."
Excellence is Obvious
Acqiris' evaluation of Pacific MindWorks was convincing. "Pacific MindWorks offers
a winning combination of experience, product, and support. Their team clearly knows
IVI inside and out. This expertise shows in the product they've built and the support
they offer. In the end it was no contest; Pacific MindWorks is the right IVI development
partner for us."