Dealing with Hardware

As this test is dedicated to hardware testing, we have to deal with hardware! There are basically two ways to connect to hardware for your test environment:

1. Re-allocate hardware on each test sequence

2. Allocate hardware one time at initialization, pass it into your Test elements

In many cases, the same hardware will be utilized for multiple tests. For instance, a DAQ commonly includes digital inputs, outputs, etc, therefore a single test sequence will likely contain multiple Test instances that utilize the same physical hardware. In these cases, hardware may be allocated to global variables. Often it is more practical to allocate the hardware one time and simply pass around the instances.

Allocation within Test

The allocation of hardware within the test is simple, but it may have a time impact that may or may not be acceptable in the application. An example of this may be found within the Simple Production Test.

One-Time Allocation

Hardware is allocated one time at the beginning of the program and the references to the hardware are passed into each test sequence. This saves quite a bit of time on fast-running tests. Hardware allocation is generally completed at the beginning of program execution, so startup time may be impacted, but the test sequence time can be truncated significantly since hardware allocation often takes more time than the test sequence. An example may be found at Simple Production Test (revisited).

In general, it is recommended to allocate hardware one-time at the beginning of the test sequence, especially in sequences that will utilize the same hardware for multiple test executions. This creates the most flexible test sequences along with requiring fewer exception handling blocks (hardware not connected or powered?), making overall code structure simpler.