Serial Communication Toolset for NI TestStand™

Version 1.0 - July 2016

MESULOG Serial Steps provides a set of high level custom TestStand steps that allows you to use easily communicate with your devices through a serial link.

Figure 1: Communicate easily with all your Serial devices from NI TestStand...

Overview of Serial Steps :

• Easy to use high level function to execute a Query
• Access to basic functions for Read, Write or Flush Buffer operations
• Free product
• Fully integrated into TestStand

Serial Steps is a toolkit for NI TestStand. It was developed to be fully integrated to Sequence Editor to provide a very easy user friendly solution to communicate with your instruments or devices in Serial.

To use all the function of Serial Steps, you just have to navigate to the dedicated insertion palette and select a function.

Figure 2: Insertion Palette of Serial Steps

Based on NI-VISA, Serial Steps can use any VISA Serial ressource available on you computer to communicate. In this way you can configure and test communication easily with NI MAX, and then use it directly in your test sequences.

In your sequences, once the communication is opened, you can execute any of the following serial function:

• Query (Write/Read)
• Write
• Read
• Flush buffers

Query Function is a macro function allowing to execute a write operation followed by a read operation. This is the most common way to communicate in Serial. This function was developed to be able to address as many case as possible. For example, it's possible to add delays between the write and the read operation and after the read operation if you device need some time to respond at a request. You can also flush buffer before the query. Each element is configurable easily from the edit window of the step.

Figure 3: Edit window of the Query Step

To make sequences more easy to write and more readable, each step have is own configuration window, help page and description of the step reflect the configuration.

Figure 4: Example of Test Sequence using Serial Steps

Serial Steps is a free product without limitation in time or use. You can install Serial Steps as many time you need and you can based your test systems on this product.

• Windows 7 or higher (32 ou 64 bits)
• NI TestStand 2012 or higher (32-bit)
• NI LabVIEW Run-Time Engine 2012 (32-bit)
• NI-VISA 5.3 or higher

Serial Steps help is available online