4. Conclusion

Faced with the rapid development of measurement in industrial fields, and the growing complexity and number of instrumentation requirements, many users find traditional development and testing procedures inadequate. Users have new needs, which can be met by building automatically interactive systems to :

• reduce manufacturing costs;

• increase the use of staff potential by freeing them up for creative tasks;

• reduce human error through repetitive, precise measurements.

To achieve these objectives, the various instruments, controllers and peripherals making up these systems must be able to connect to each other easily. The first step has been taken with standard interfaces. In particular, the IEEE-488 interface considerably simplifies the configuration...