[961] in linux-announce channel archive
The Linux Lab Project
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lars Wirzenius)
Thu Aug 24 04:59:42 1995
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 1995 15:06:20 +0300
From: Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cc.helsinki.fi>
To: linux-announce@vger.rutgers.edu
From: clausi@chemie.fu-berlin.de (Claus Schroeter)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce
Subject: The Linux Lab Project
Organization: Freie Universitaet Berlin
Approved: linux-announce@news.ornl.gov (Lars Wirzenius)
Followup-to: comp.os.linux.development.apps
######################################################################
Announcing - the LINUX-LAB Project (LLP)
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What is the Linux Lab Project ?
--------------------------------
This project should help people, dealing with data aquisition,
process control, laboratory automation and similar things within
a educational or industrial environment.
Unnecessary to say - LINUX is known as reliable and transparent
development platform for a wide variety of applications. If one wants
to use LINUX to get measurements or control instruments
he has two choices:
- The one is return to DOS and use all the colorful tools but spend more
time to hack around memory-problems, driver-incompatibilities, library-bugs
and other surprises DOS has in store for us. :-(
- The other way is using LINUX with all its nice features but this will
often be the harder way, as driver and applications have to be written
first.
For the bigger percentage of LINUX users the latter will be a real
problem because they have no knowledge about all the hardware-related
stuff.
The LINUX-LAB Project wants to fill this gap step by step.
That does not mean that there will be a big application in the future
that solves all your problems and tasks but there should be a forum
for discussions or assistance and a pool with existing software that
can be taken as template for own developments.
The project should be helpfull for all, experienced
and inexperienced users as well.
What's in store already ?
---------------------------
o) Support for IEEE-488 (GPIB,HPIB) boards
- consists of three parts:
a kernel driver module (full configurable at runtime)
a user c-call library
ibsh a tcl/tk extension to access the bus via tcl/tk
[State: useable]
o) Support for several commercial multifunction boards
( D/A, A/D, data aquisition etc)
- 2 National Instruments multifunction board
AT-MIO16F [comes with tcl/tk interface]
and lab-pc+ (written by glenn moloney)
[State: under development]
- 1 Keythley board
DAS-1200 (written by matt welch)
[State: under development]
o) Support for CAMAC controllers
[State: first alpha]
Are there ideas for the future ?
--------------------------------
When I started the project my idea was to have more than one hardware
product supported by one software, but this will be very difficult due to
the functional differences between all the availiable hardware.
So I decided that a set of 'tools' would be handy that can be combined
to a bigger application system that supports a wide variety of hardware
and provides a graphical interface, a mathematical interface and perhaps
network support. Currently this ideas are far away from
reality because there has to be elementary support for usual measurement
hardware components first..but let us see...
To simplify the process of driver-writing for linux i thought about
LDDK (Linux Device Driver development kit) it should help the hardware
developers and the driver developers as well to implement a driver
as quickly as possible:
LDDK should consist of:
o) a source-code generator that generates a driver skeleton
from a driver definition language, the generator should
take care of:
- support for loadable modules
- capability for dynamic configuration
- transport of data through the user/kernel-space
interface
- generating library-stubs for driver routines
o) a user-library that supports generated calls
(could be generated from the DDL) and the interface
to the dynamic configuration capability.
o) a kernel-space library that provides:
- routines for debbuging and error logging
- routines for dynamic allocation of DMA memory
- driver-stubs for the dynamic configuration
capability
[State: lot of work :-)]
The second tool would be a application system that provides
functionalities to get measurements and handle the data.
The system should be comfortable enough to have a graphical
user interface. I think a TCL/TK extension/interpreter
could do the job if there would be the following features:
o) a interface to the library-stubs for each supported
hardware. (can be implemented with dll support)
o) a simple vector processing extension where data vectors can
be handled as tcl-objects. The extension should provide
operations like:
- adding, subtracting etc vector data
- smoothing (or digital filters)
- linear/nonlinear curve fit on vector data
Just some ideas :-)
Where can I get Information about the project?
------------------------------------
Existing packages developed under this project can be found on
ftp://koala.chemie.fu-berlin.de/pub/linux/LINUX-LAB
or the 1st mirror
ftp://enif.astro.indiana.edu/pub/LINUX-LAB
( thanks to geo :-) )
If you want to join the project as coworker or if you want to
get help on a certain problem related to this stuff you should
subscribe to the LLP mailing list:
Send email with only the word 'info' in the subject (without
the quotes of course) to the mailing-list robot account:
llp-request@koala.chemie.fu-berlin.de
and you will get back a short introduction.
Alternatively you can contact me personally at
clausi@chemie.fu-berlin.de
feel free to send your suggestions or criticism (if there is any) :-)
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Now have fun
cheers
clausi
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