With release 3.4, WinVue will attempt to detect automatically at start-up any VueMetrix controllers that are attached to the PC. It does this by interrogating the operating system for the list of available serial ports and then trying to send the message “sn?>” [what is your serial number?] on each port. All VueMetrix controllers understand this question, so if any is connected it will reply. This procedure is tried at the two possible baud rates used by our products (19200 and 115200).
Once a VueMetrix controller is identified, WinVue sends it the further message “prod?>” [what product are you?]. Any VueMetrix controller (assuming it is running the most recent firmware) will respond with a series of characters that indicates what type of controller it is. WinVue then compares this string with the information in its config file to determine whether the controller is a type that it is configured to support. If it is, the connection is then established automatically. In favorable cases this will save the user the trouble of selecting the serial port and configuring it properly. Things will be pretty much “plug and play.”
The “Connection” menu is therefore changed. It still shows a list of available ports to choose from, but the only ports that appear in this list are those where a VueMetrix controller is known to be present. There are also two new menu selections:
Refresh. This causes the start-up procedure just described to repeat, and the list of available ports is re-initialized. This is what you do when you add a controller to the PC.
Information. A little window pops up to show the list of all ports on the system, whether they connect with a VueMetrix controller, and what is known about that controller (S/N and product type).
That being said, this scheme is not bulletproof. There are two basic problems with it. First of all, foreign (i.e. non-VueMetrix) devices that happen to be connected to the PC's serial ports may generate errors when WinVue sends them a string of characters they cannot understand. This is known to be a case with Agilent instruments that use RS-232. Second, “legacy” VueMetrix products do not understand the “prod?>” message. In that case, WinVue cannot determine the controller's type and does not know if it can connect to it safely. So it will not connect automatically. The user then has to make a selection from the communications menu and hit connect.
In case of need you can go back to the old way by changing the winvue.ini config file. The entry comm_auto_detect under the “general” section must be set to 0 to turn all this off.
There is now a version of firmware available for every standard VueMetrix product that responds to the “prod?>” query.
The little banner to the right of the Connect button now displays the number of serial communication faults that have occurred since the connection was originally made. A right mouse click on this banner will bring up a more detailed description of the last of these faults.
The so-called “Tool Tips” - those little yellow text rectangles that pop up in most Windows applications – have been replaced by a similar facility called “Balloon Help”. Unlike tool tips, these help balloons are not drawn by what we Windows users euphemistically call the operating system; instead they're drawn under the programmer's control. The upshot is that they actually work and are somewhat more configurable. In WinVue they mostly appear as black characters on yellow text, but a few of them are white on red for emphasis when they involve safety-related stuff.
The Balloon Help can be globally disabled with a menu selection under “Help”. Each one of them will only display itself five times; then it will silently stop appearing. If the text content changes – this happens in a few cases - the count is reset and the balloon pops up again.
On program launch a Window containing the newly designed company logo and some copyright information appears. This is supposed to keep the user amused while the program configures itself and takes care of all its start-up chores. The window will automatically disappear and the functional windows will open as before. If the user wants to see it again he can choose “Help->About” from the menus.
The “About” information has been removed from the Utility window. No functional changes occurred to this window.
There are a few other small cosmetic changes to the sliders, the bar graphs, and the service window. The CPU temperature readout is now a bar graph rather than a number.
All the sliders now implement a feature where a right click brings up a text entry field. The user can type in a new value.
There is now a selection on the Autostart window that tells the controller to restart the Autostart routine when an interlock fault is cleared. This will occur without any further user intervention. Of course this is not CDRH compliant, so the customer must design compliance into some other part of their system. There is a big red Balloon Tip to warn him of this.
The “demo” versions of the program are now a separate application from the real one. There is always a demo for every product, and it is always named [product-name]_demo.exe. It lives in the same dist directory with the other one. This was changed because some people found the demo to be confusing (“too realistic”) when they accidentally launched it.