The company Qualicasa tests the condition of buildings on the basis of building physical measurements. Afterwards the collected data will be evaluated. So, capital investment can be better calculated.

The previous measuring system consisted of a notebook with a integrated control application (A-Casa) and a microcontroller-based peripheral station. These two device were connected through a DECT radio link. Different measuring instruments were connected to the peripheral station. The existing solution have had some disadvantages with the stability of the connection and the usability.

The new developed measuring system uses WLAN for the radio link. So, we implemented a universal useable socket connection. The peripheral station is based on a embedded pc, which is connected with the measuring devices (hammer plant, noise generator, noise analyzer).

Before we started with the different jobs, we have had to define a stable communication protocol.

The control application (A-Casa) have been modified to create a socket connection. Moreover, the graphical user interface have been customized to make it more useable. The software has been designed with the development environment ?VisualAge? from IBM, because already the old application was written with this tool.

The peripheral station includes a integrated PCI WLAN card to establish a connection with the control application. The hammer plant is connected with a parallel port. Between the hammer plant and the embedded pc, there is a small breakout-box with some integrated light emitting diodes to show the state of the application. The noise generator is connected with a standard audio wire and the noise analyzer uses a serial port to transfer data. The software has been designed with the development environment ?Visual C++? from Microsoft.

The implementation of a stable measuring system proved to be more difficult than we thought. Moreover, it was dodgy to modify the complex unknown application A-Casa.