Ball Systems' Custom, Handheld Analyzer For Proprietary Communications Bus Testing Featured In Military Embedded

Ball Systems designed a small custom handheld test platform based around the NI single-board RIO deployable embedded device, adding additional circuitry and packaging. Ultimately, the team developed a tool that fully evaluates bus health, performance, layout, power, and bandwidth utilization and providing a consistent and reliable problem diagnosis.

The result is a portable, battery powered system that performs high level bus functions including:

• Bus device inventory
• Bus delay testing
• Address scanning
• Bus monitoring
• Bus traffic storage
• The ability to simulate a downstream bus to an upstream controller

The system also performs physical layer testing including:

• Cable resistance measurement
• Bus bias voltage measurement
• Bus power (voltage and current)
• Signal margin measurement

You can read the full article “Test and measurement sector grapples with standardization, complex systems” at Military Embedded.

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