A DEVICE DRIVER ARCHITECTURE FOR TELEMETRY APPLICATIONS

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1998 / Town & Country Resort Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, CaliforniaThis paper illustrates a device driver implementation used to support a PC compatible telemetry device. Device requirements included operation on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 95, Windows NT 5.0 and Windows 98 platforms. A single device driver was not possible due to the differences between driver requirements on the various operating systems. The Windows Driver Model (WDM) was considered for NT 5.0 and Win98, however, NT 4.0 and Win95 does not support the WDM. To minimize software development and support efforts, it was clear that an architecture compatible to both WDM, NT 4.0 and Windows 95 needed to be developed. The resulting layered device driver architecture provides a common upper interface and uses a register based model to describe the hardware at the lower interface. The common upper interface is compatible with all of the target operating systems and presents a consistent Applications Programming Interface (API) for the telemetry application developer. The lower interface is specific for each platform but contains minimal device specific functionality. A simple register I/O driver is easily implemented using all of the target operating systems. The layered architecture and register based interface to the hardware results in a multiple operating system code set which differs only at the lowest layer.International Foundation for TelemeteringProceedings from the International Telemetering Conference are made available by the International Foundation for Telemetering and the University of Arizona Libraries. Visit http://www.telemetry.org/index.php/contact-us if you have questions about items in this collection