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The production processes of today's industry are continually placing higher demands on quality. In order to guarantee the quality of products, appropriate test systems have to be applied. Optical measuring procedures are used ever more frequently, since complicated forms and fragile sections can be measured without direct contact. The objective of the customer is to develop a measuring microscope which can fulfill future production requirements.

The aim of this diploma was to develop a software prototype with which the most important operational sequences and functions can be shown. On one hand, this concerns the representation and handling of graphical measuring items, and on the other hand, the interaction with the hardware and the control of the measuring desk. Thereby two design patterns responsible for the data administration and representation, play a central role. The design of a graphical user interface which can be served easily is also important.

The software was developed according to object-oriented principles and implemented with Borland Delphi. The product can thus be transferred to the customer who can then develop it further.

Today, surgical interventions with endoscopes need several additional devices, such as light sources, cameras and also robots. These must be controlled by the operating surgeon or an assistant. Since the surgeon need his hands and eyes for the actual operation, controlling these devices always means a diverson of the surgeons attention. Furthermore the hands of the surgeon must remain sterile which is difficult to ensure when the devices have to be manually controlled. A substantial improvement is achieved when the devices can be controlled by voice. This would mean that the surgeon can concentrate on his operation display and has his hands and eyes free to the operation. The tasks was to develop a dialogue concept for such a speech control of medicine-technical devices needed for endoscopic operations. In addition, a prototype of the speech control and a simple graphic user surface were to be implemented in order to evaluate the chosen dialogue concept. Major emphasis during this diploma thesis was put on the development and test of different dialogue concepts. Particularly attention was given to the naturalness of the dialogue. With the help of the video tapes we developed use cases for three typical situations. The different dialogue concepts were designed along these use cases. The concepts differ mainly in the structure of the command tree and the navigation through it. The dialogues for the different devices were implemented and tested in English and German with the development software grapHvite. As a result of our diploma work, a dialogue was developed, which is speaker independent. The dialog of each device has the following structure: 1. name of the device, 2. function, 3. instruction. The devices could be controlled by one command (consisting of several words) or by single words. A focus is set on the accordant place, so that the speaker can continue from this point with a next command.

We devised a distributed software system which purpose is to collect measurement data from various measurepoints (of a solar power plant system, e.g.), to display selections of related data in a graphical way and to make the data available for browsing and further analysis.

The data comes along as a series of E-Mail messages. After having undergone various plausibility checks the data is fed into a data base. The data base in turn can be accessed by a Web-based Client-Server setup. The user is guided through the steps of selecting data ranges by various criteria and having them displayed as graphical charts or as tabular data.

Our solution consists of a mail-converter which parses the data, checks for proper origin, date and value consistency. For data base access an application server is responsible to handle the requests of a client process.

For maximum platform independency all programming was done in Java. This choice also made the tasks of accessing the database via JDBC and the communication between client applet and application server using RMI rather straight-forward.

This report describes our prototypical implentation of the whole system and the criteria we followed for the design choices. It also shows the trade-off between a most flexible system for easy adaptation and a rich functionality from the user's point of view. The latter would clearly require extensive work in order to build a sophisticated user interface with application-specific user guidance. We concentrated on system design so as to demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the overall setup chosen.

Every year the ZHW offers different postgraduate studies and courses for interested persons. The program of these courses is published on the WWW as well as in a printed program brochure. Up to these days the description of a course was written on paper by the tutor. These descriptions where edited and corrected several times, printed and afterwards copied into the WWW where it was soon enough out of date.

Our goal was to improve these inefficient way of publishing the program. Our application enables one to enter, edit and manage the description of a course directly via the webbrowser. Interested persons may enrol via the web or to order a printed version of the complete course program. Tutors will be able to update the descriptions of their courses while administrators have the possibilities to create new courses, edit existing courses, publish them on the web or delete an old course.

To be able to offer these functions, we made full use of the latest technologies for creating dynamic webcontent. We deployed Java Servlets in addition with an Oracle7-Database-Engine and an Apache webserver. To develop such an application, good tools are indispensable. We utilised Metrowerks Codewarrior 5 as a integrated development environment, Macromedia Dreamweaver 2 as a HTML-editor as well as Macromedia Fireworks and Adobe Photshop for graphics.

Since we used field-tested technologies the technological challenge of this work was not to high. Unlike the pure extent of the functions to implement was a challenge we underestimated.

In the present work, the goal was to develop a CANopen capable pressure sensor. Our part of the work was concerned on the higher layer protocol CANopen which is based on CAN Bus.

CANopen - it was hard to get it open!

What you have to know introductionary: CAN means Controller Area Network. It is a real-time capable fieldbus for intelligent devices as well as actuators. The CiA (CAN in Automation) is a international non-profit group which defines the standards of CANopen. The ISO-OSI Layer-Model is a standardized model for data exchange in communication-systems. A Higher Layer Protocoll is a software solution based on ISO-OSI Layer #7.

Based on the CiA Profil DS 301 Version 4.0 (Application Layer and Communication Profile) we implemented a CANopen node.

The interface to the layer #2 is defined in a way that our software can be adapted easily to different CAN-Controllers. We also paid great attention on different priorities of the various communication objects.

Borland C was used because of its high compatibility to most target-systems.

For the reason of an easier testing and the ability of developing independent from the DA Zem99/2a (Hardware Layer) we decided to design a PC-based solution. With our CANopen Network, including two different nodes and several analysis tools, we established an optimal test- and working environment.

We implemented and tested on its functionality the necessary hardware drivers, a flexible buffer-structure, the data structure of the object dictionary as well as the NMT- and SDO-Communication. The missing object dictionary entries, the application as well as the error-handling still need to be implemented. The complete software has to be transferred to a target system where the time critical parts may be tested under high bus load.