1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to bus communications, and specifically to a software tool for generating bus traffic for simulation, test and end-use applications by integrating a scripting programming language with bus-specific functionality.
2. Description of Related Art
A military standard 1553 (Mil-Std-1553) bus is a serial bus developed to facilitate intra-component communications aboard high performance aircraft, tanks, spacecraft, missiles and other networked vehicles. As is well known, bus traffic on a Mil-Std-1553 bus conforms to a packetized message protocol that provides fixed start/stop times, message addressing, message length, formatting, arbitration, and the like.
Conventionally, an end user tests or simulates operation of a hardware device ported on a Mil-Std-1553 bus by compiling and running a software test application, or project, that transmits test command messages to the hardware device over the Mil-Std-1553 bus. Because the end user must typically handle details of the packetized message protocol through, for example, a low level programming language such as C to enable the command messages to control the ported hardware device, a user must typically rewrite and recompile a significant portion of the project code each time a new hardware device type is ported to the Mil-Std-1553 bus for testing.
Attempts have been made to develop software scripting tools that abstract the Mil-Std-1553 driver layer in order to test hardware devices such as avionics data points under simulated operating conditions. However, such tools are limited in their programmability and can therefore not be easily re-targeted for use in testing different types of Mil-Std-1553 devices without requiring a significantly amount of rewriting and recompiling of the source code of the tools. In addition, such tools are often highly complex due to the rather generic form they must take to accommodate all possible uses. Therefore, the scripting tool, and consequently the device tests, is difficult to run from the end user's perspective because each test presents a user with a new interactive experience.