An arduino platform for remote control and bus testing of programmable instruments

This paper presents an Arduino platform developed to control a programmable instrument (a digital signal generator) remotely through the RS-232 interface using the Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments (SCPI). The platform can be used in Automatic Testing laboratories, where manual control of instruments is not possible or it can be dangerous for human or when the testing scenario must be repeated several times. Also, the developed Arduino platform can be used to generate data traffic through the RS-232 bus for the bus health testing from a predictive maintenance point-of-view, the platform being much cheaper than classical bus testing demo boards from leading companies. Finally, the platform can be easily extended with different interfaces or shields for other data buses like RS-485, USB, Ethernet, CAN, etc., and for other test and measurement instruments.