John Pinner - Clockwork Systems

An EMC Vehicle Testing System using Open Source on Linux

Clockwork have supplied a major automobile manufacturer with a GNU/Linux system for Electro Magnetic Compatibility testing of complete vehicles. The software controls tests via the IEEE488 General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB) and acquires test data from the same bus. It stores results and produces reports with text and both tabulated and plotted results. It is a combination of standard Open Source modules (like GNUplot) with a substantial amount of bespoke software written in both Python and C, and using the PyQt GUI toolkit and Clockwork's own Thyme development environment. All the software has been supplied under the GPL.

The talk describes this project and relates the problems we encountered when implementing it, and how we resolved them. It has resulted in many improvements to our systems, a novel way of using OpenOffice.org, and a much enhanced Python GPIB module. These are being made available as GPL'd Open Source.