Real-time Linux basierter low cost Rheometer

Rheologic measurement cycles do take a certain amount of time and the number of rheometer-devices is limited, therefore it is often not possible to carry out a large test series. It is intended to raise the amount of control samples in quality assurance and laboratory environments with new automated low cost measurement devices. A low cost principle which should be accomplished by a new measurement concept, usage of low cost parts and open source products in control system design has been built. It is optimized for Bitumen (remains of distillation of crude oil with a colloidal structure) which changes viscosity typically in a range of 10 to the power of 7 but it can nevertheless be used for many other materials as well. Most real-time applications in context of automatic control and data acquisition do require user interfaces to change parameters or to extract data at runtime. Especially in prototyping control processes, it is common to use CACSD programs such as Matlab or Scicos for code generation. While still being in the prototyping stage the customer demands to start the evaluation of the prototype using a software tool. Very often those customers do not possess the ability to work with CACSD tools or other tools such as xRTAILab because of missing licenses or the lack of knowledge in linux. To close the gap between the real-time target and data evaluation, a remote control framework is introduced. The approach discussed in this work is to use RTAIXML as a XML-RPC server. It is running on the rt-system and has the ability to connect to the CACSD generated code. This server instance can be contacted through a platform independent Java framework which allows quick prototyping of simple to use user interfaces without interfering the control system development. It is possible to transfer scopes and to change parameters on running targets.