[Ground-station] "Hello World" acceptance testing for test equipment

[Paul Williamson]

> On Nov 3, 2020, at 7:50 PM, Drew Arnett <arnett.drew at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello world for SCPI instruments is ask("*IDN?"), no?  What are you
> thinking about?  

I was thinking about something a little more instrument-specific. Make a meaningful measurement, exercise some of the neat features. 

> Are you accepting the gear or are you accepting the
> users for remote controlling of the gear?

My notion was just to get the gear tried out right away, even if it wasn’t needed for any urgent testing requirement. If there’s a DOA we can get it fixed or replaced before it becomes a bottleneck. (Coincidentally this provides an excuse to play with the gear as it arrives!)

Keeping those quick tests handy is a good idea, too. When things aren’t working and we start to suspect the test gear, it’s really useful to have a set of known-working procedures to run against the instruments. They may also be useful as basic programming examples for lab users to refer to. For instance, that power meter comes with examples for USB and Windows. If we want to talk SCPI/Ethernet and Linux, we will have to translate.

I’m not thinking about accepting users in the sense that they’d have hoops to jump through before being allowed access. There’s no need for that. I just want to provide whatever resources we can in order to make it easy to get started and be productive.

> Side note:  I usually put test equipment on a private test equipment
> LAN.

That’s pretty much a given, since we have to provide our own access control.

>  If folks need to use the gear remotely, they can remote into the
> test control PC that is multihomed on the test equipment LAN.

That’s one good way to do it, but it might not always be the best. I’m thinking that a Linux box can do access control and also provide VPN access to the test equipment LAN. I’m prototyping that right now with a Raspberry Pi 4, which may well end up being sufficient for production. Some tests will probably be easier to run on the Pi and some will be easier to run on Windows or whatever else we have.

> Touch screen with gestures?  Sorry, not a fan of touch screens on test
> gear.  

Not so easy to remote a touchscreen, so the feature is pretty much wasted on us.

> But SCPI over telnet works just fine, too.

Telnet! This is why access control is important.

  -Paul