ISAAC Instruments Uses Windriver
        for the development of Vehicle Testing Solutions

ISAAC chose Jungo’s WinDriver USB driver development toolkit as none of their developers had prior experience with driver development. On a previous project ISAAC developers attempted to develop a driver on their own. They soon found out that the amount of time needed to make the driver work was immense. 

"After wasting significant time on the attempt to write a driver we concluded that this time would have been more profitable if directed to the actual product development”, said David Brillon, co-founder of Isaac Instruments. “We didn't want to waste any time on this project to reinvent the wheel.  All of our efforts were concentrated on what we do best - data acquisition systems.  We selected WinDriver and with very little effort we were able to communicate with our USB devices.”

ISAAC Instruments offers two models of recorders: the Professional and the Standard systems. The models differ mainly by their size, number of channels and amount of memory. Both recorders feature the same level of high quality manufacturing, including a robust anodized aluminum enclosure, gold plated military spec, vibration resistant connectors, non-volatile memory to protect data and configuration in case of power failure, Internal accelerometers, voltage and temperature sensors, and, full compatibility with all of ISAAC’s Instruments detectors, sensors, displays and software. The instruments also offer CAN and OBD vehicle busses and GPS connectivity, 13 or 24 inputs, up to 512 MB of non-volatile memory, and RS-232, USB or Bluetooth connectivity.

To connect with the recorders the applications developed by ISAAC use a communication server.  This server is responsible to translate all the commands from the applications to the recorders, by creating an abstraction layer between the applications and the recorders.  Another function of the server is to synchronize all the requests sent to the recorders by the applications.

The USB communication is implemented with the help of WinDriver USB for Windows. ISAAC required that the recorders be auto detected and the option of downloading data from the recorders to the PC. Before adding USB, ISAAC used a RS-232 connection that allows a maximum transfer speed of only 115 kbaud. ISAAC’s new recorders are equipped with 512 MB of internal memory; in order to transfer this amount of data to the PC a much faster connection was required. The USB bus and the WinDriver USB based driver were able to allow ISAAC to reach the performance they required.

The operation of the driver is straightforward. Once the driver has detected a USB recorder the user has the option of sending commands to the device, via  a "Question and Answer" scheme of commands. Three types of commands have been implemented:

• Real-time commands which capture snapshots of data being recorded and the current state of the recorder.
• Configuration commands that allow the configuration of the recorder.
• Data transfer commands that facilitate the need to transfer data from the recorder to the PC. This functionality was implemented using the extensive WinDriver API.