Universal Device Control Library for Laser CAD Applications

Abstract

The project is about design and development of a C# .net based application software library for building customized application software’s to control Laser systems with several other supporting devices. The main reason to come up with this architecture is to reduce the development time for a specific custom laser. The original development time to come up with a software control application was about 2 months. Also when the number of lasers and other devices get higher the controlling application get more complex and difficult to maintain. The designed architecture supports more than 20 devices to be controlled from a single application. Theoretically, it supports any number of devices. But hardware, communication and memory constraints will limit the number of devices to be controlled using this library. The number of lasers for a one single Application can go up to 10 lasers plus few supporting devices. Example of some supporting devices is delay generators, Wave form generator and Energy meter. Final goal of this project was to come up with set of C#.net DLLs which could be used to develop a device controlling application within 2 weeks of time. Proposed architecture has gone beyond this 2 weeks goal and a trained developer can be able to develop a basic laser controlling application within a day. This architectural design used all most all the OOP concepts and also some advanced techniques like reflection based dynamic device bindings and a reflection based XML data base manager module. This architecture has enabled different communication methods (RS232, Ethernet) to control the Lasers and the other devices. The communication medium is hidden to the top level controlling classes of specific device. The Thesis discussed about the main architecture and the important individual modules. A separate developer guide section is available for the application developer to refer.