Creating Stimulus Profiles

Use stimulus profiles to act as the test executive that defines the stimuli to apply to a unit under test (UUT).

Before you begin, you should familiarize yourself with the Stimulus Profile Editor environment. In real-time test, a stimulus is a physical or logical input that incites a reaction from the UUT. A typical stimulus might be a change in temperature, voltage, power, or any other variable that might affect the behavior of the UUT.

A stimulus profile contains specific tasks, called real-time sequences, that deploy to the UUT and execute in real-time. Stimulus profiles execute on the host computer and control some actions of the VeriStand environment. For example, stimulus profiles can open and close projects and user interface windows and log the results of test scenarios to TDMS files.

Stimulus profiles appear on the VeriStand Editor in the Project Files tab with the file extension .nivsstimprof. A single VeriStand project can contain multiple stimulus profiles that define different test scenarios. You can execute multiple stimulus profiles concurrently, and each stimulus profile can contain multiple real-time sequences.

1. In the VeriStand Editor, click Tool Launcher» Stimulus Profile Editor .
2. In the Stimulus Profile Editor, click File» New» Stimulus Profile . The profile organizes your code into the Setup, Main, and Clean Up blocks.
3. Drag steps from the Steps palette to the appropriate block of the stimulus profile. For example, you might launch a user interface as part of your Setup code and close the user interface as part of your Clean Up code. The Main block typically contains calls to real-time sequences, which are programs that define specific tasks to execute on the UUT. This block might also contain steps that configure data logging to TDMS.
4. For each step you add, click the step in the stimulus profile code and use the Property Browser to configure the step.
5. Click Compile.
   1. Resolve any Warnings and Errors.
      

      Note

      A stimulus profile can run with warnings, but not errors. You can save the profile and resolve errors later.

6. Save the stimulus profile.

After you configure and save the stimulus profile and any real-time sequences it calls, you can run the profile. Deploy its associated system definition to run the stimulus profile.