Meetings:2005-12

From GTALUG

Meetings > December 2005

TLUG meetings are held at the University of Toronto on the second Tuesday of each month at 7:30 pm.

Date

Tuesday December 13, 2005

Time

7:30 pm

Topic

Open Source Software for Electronic Instrumentation

Speakers

The presenters are Peter Hiscocks and James Gaston, both with Syscomp Electronic Design Limited. Peter recently retired from a lengthy career teaching courses in Electrical Engineering at Ryerson University to focus on the development of low cost, open-source instrumentation for EE students. James recently completed his MASc in Electrical Engineering at Ryerson. His thesis project was an autonomous group of mobile robots that collaborate to climb stairs.

Description

The Tcl/Tk language has particular strengths in building virtual interfaces for electronic equipment. This talk builds on a talk that was given some years ago to TLUG, outlining the basics of Tcl/Tk and showing its strengths and weaknesses. For example, Tcl/Tk has particular strengths in gluing together other programs or acting as a front end for a legacy application. It is particularly powerful for rapidly creating a graphical user interface.

In addition to an overview of Tcl/Tk, we will demonstrate two electronic instruments, an oscilloscope and a function generator, that are operated via USB connections to a Tcl/Tk virtual instrument running on a host PC. USB has a number of attractions but has the potential for being extremely complex. It is possible to bypass the complexity with a virtual serial connection, and we'll describe the hardware and software required to do hassle-free USB.

The virtual oscilloscope and virtual function generator applications will be available as open source.

Location

   Room GB220, Galbraith Building, University of Toronto
   Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G8 
   University of Toronto 

Map

http://oracle.osm.utoronto.ca/map/ http://maps.google.ca/maps?q=35+St+George+St,+Toronto,+ON&hl=en