Software Design

RTC has a strong multi-disciplinary team of software engineers, experienced in all aspects of engineering system design. We have extensive experience in ‘C’, National Instruments LabView, Mathworks’ Matlab/Simulink, Dymola and assembler low level programming.

Our graphical user interface is authored using National Instruments’ LabWindows/CVI. The development of this interface over the years has been driven significantly by customer feedback, so is very much tuned to the particular requirements of the industry and offers many features to reduce the operation of even the most complex rigs to simple, intuitive and easily documented operator procedures.

Each bespoke control system is unique, the capabilities of our controllers have advanced and continue to advance with available technology. In spite of this, there is a conscious effort to maintain a common “look and feel” to the user interface, so that any requirement for operator re-training on a new rig tends to be limited to issues regarding the new unit under test.

Our control software is written using Matlab/Simulink and implemented on an industrial PC. Using such a platform, running as an “xPC embedded target system”, we currently embed up to four independent control systems, each supporting full non-linear PID control at 1kHz, into a single PC. Concurrent with the PID control, each controller may generate real-time load command profiles, check multiple inputs for alarm limit violations, perform I/O sequencing and supply continuous status information to the user interface via an Ethernet link. Apart from initial set up, the embedded PC requires no intervention from the user interface to perform these tasks. Even with such an apparently heavy workload, the processor still spends up to 70% of its time in idle, so there is plenty of spare capacity for the addition of customised features if required.

Data Acquisition Screen - Main Menu

Channel Display Screen

Test Data Display

Test Data Display

Data Acquisition Screen - Main Menu