As mentioned above, Fluke900Link is a holistic control program for the Fluke900 that creates a development and testing environment that is efficient and accurate (hopefully). Outside of normal activities such as transferring files to/from the unit and doing other tasks, Fluke900Link is aimed a Sequence, Location and Library development.

In the original ZTest software, the PC software ran .zsq files (ZTest Sequence?) directly from the PC and allowed you to step through the testing process there. While that is certainly the end goal of Fluke900Link, the first steps are to allow creation of the OnDevice testing files as mentioned above. These files are TEXT based which make them easier to jump into, but must be compiled into binary and placed on the Fluke900 for execution. They are also interrelated with dependencies, so for now Fluke900Link will aim for easy PC development of these files, initial checking of these files on the PC, transfer to the Fluke900 and then compilation on the Fluke900. At that point, the user will switch over to execution of a specific sequence on the Fluke900 and a Unit Under Test PCB (UUT).

Why not .ZSQ files now? Well, just like many of the files developed by ZTest, they are binary files and not TEXT based. So, they need reverse-engineered. Right now, the main 'workflows' that I would like this software to support are...

1. (DONE) Authoring of .LOC and .SEQ text files
2. (DONE) Automatic parsing of .LOC files in order to generate a dynamic library (.lib) of simulation data for the Fluke900
3. (DONE) Pre-Compilation checks on the .LOC and .SEQ files on the PC before they are transferred to the Fluke900 and compiled there.
4. Full Compilation of .LOC and .SEQ files native to the PC Software
5. (DONE) A Project infrastructure that allows grouping of many .LOC and .SEQ files into a logical structure (Game)
6. Direct Execution of a TEST Sequence (.ZSQ) on the PC (no file copying to the Fluke900 except for Library data)
7. Eventually, it would be great to have a repository of actual test routines as well where all authors could create and share directly from within Fluke900Link.

Projects

As mentioned above, Project Files (.f9p) are a new filetype for Fluke900Link that are simply a collection of native filetypes and some configuration settings stored in an XML file. The idea is that within a project you may have several test sequences (a quick test, several functional area tests and a grid test [all IC's in order]) but they can be contained in a single folder and viewed all together, but executed individually. As far as locations files, you would most likely have a location file for each physical PCB in the set... so, for I,Robot, you would have two Location definition files one for the PCB and one for the Video PCB. Similarly, with Star Wars, you might have 3 location files... CPU.loc, VECTOR.loc and SOUND.loc.