Custom Instrument Tutorial - Hooking the Script up to the GUI

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Modified by Admin on Nov 6, 2013

We have our designed instrument panel. We have our DelphiScript code to achieve the desired manipulation of the output. We now need to hook our script up to the GUI, so that the relevant procedure can be called when a certain event occurs within the panel.

Each component/control has a number of events associated with it. These are the events that the component/control can 'react' to. The script code that gets used when an event is 'fired' is that event's handling code. The parent procedure or function written in the script is therefore the 'event handler'. The logical place then, to link event to event handler, is the value of the event – defined on the Events panel, when the Design tab of the dialog is active.

When monitoring inputs or controlling outputs – wired to the Custom Instrument – we are dealing with not just a single control object on the instrument's panel, but rather the entire panel itself. The event we are interested in, and to which we will link our code to write values onto the Data_Out line, is the OnReadWrite event.

The panel's OnReadWrite event is hard coded to 'fire' each time the instrument polls. The polling interval is 250ms by default, and can be changed in the Custom Instrument - Options dialog (accessed by clicking on the Options button included on the panel).

IO values are updated by nature of the polling, not by the OnReadWrite event. The latter is simply a method to synchronously call code which can process the signal values at each poll point.

Each time the instrument polls, the current value for each input signal is read into an internal storage structure. Similarly, the current value internally stored for each output signal is made available at the corresponding output pin of the instrument. The internal storage structure is transparent to the user and, as such, cannot be accessed in any way. The event handling code linked to the OnReadWrite event is essentially used to process the IO as required.

Figure 1. Use event handling code linked to the panel's OnReadWrite event to process signal IO each time the instrument polls.

If polling is turned off (by setting the Update value in the Custom Instrument - Options dialog to 0ms), the OnReadWrite event will not fire. It will, however, fire if the Synchronize button is available on the instrument's panel, and is pressed. This would essentially be a 'manual poll'.

Let's go ahead and hook up our two scripting procedures to the relevant objects and events.

Open the Custom Instrument Configuration dialog (if not already) and make the Design tab active.
Click anywhere within the bounds of the panel, away from controls, to select the DesignedAreaPanel object.
From the associated Events panel, click inside the field to the right of the OnReadWrite event and use the drop-down to choose (and assign) the DesignedAreaPanelReadWrite procedure.
Now click to select the SOFTWARE OVERRIDE Button control.
In the associated Events panel, click inside the field to the right of the OnClick event and use the drop-down to choose (and assign) the Panel_Override_ButtonClick procedure.

That's it. We have completely finished configuring our custom instrument. Time to target and program the physical FPGA device with our design, so that we can see it in action!