This presentation by Ben Kupferschmidt covers improvements that we have made to TTCWare to make it easier to use. These include the modernization of many of the most commonly used screens in the software and an updated main user interface.
The 2021 Aerospace Instrumentation Technology Workshop was held March 23-24, 2021.
Video Transcript
Hi, I'm Ben Kupferschmidt. I'm the Ground Solutions Product Line Manager for Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions Aerospace Instrumentation Group I'm excited to present the major enhancements that we've made to TTCWare over the last year to make it easier to use. So before I begin, I wanted to just tell everybody what TTCWare is.
TTCWare is our configuration and programming software for the majority of our data acquisition system hardware that we sell. TTCWare supports the configuration of over 900 different products that have been developed over the past 20 years. We have considered many ideas to make TTCWare a better and more powerful and easier to use application and so we wanted to discuss some of the things we considered when we were doing this. We identified several areas we wanted to improve - one of which was some of the screens were just difficult to navigate.
Some of the screens worked very well when you had a small project but didn't scale well for a large system. We also felt that there was an inconsistent look and feel because the application had been developed over a very long period of time and we wanted to address that and then we also felt that the customers had a desire to see more information about their setup without having to switch screens and look for the information - they should just be there when they wanted to see it. So we decided to address these problems. So in 2020 we started a project to solve these issues and the main goals for this effort were make TTCWare easier to use while still maintaining the basic structure of the application so that users that were very experienced with it wouldn't be lost. As well, it would be easy for new users to pick up. We wanted to improve the performance of the software for common use cases and we also wanted to update all the legacy components to use newer technology that would result in better security and better performance. And finally we wanted to maintain backwards compatibility with all the existing customer projects. We know that many customers have been using TTCWare for over 20 years and they have a large backlog of projects that they've created. I'm going to make sure that all of them still work in the latest version and that's something we're very proud of is that all projects that have ever been created will still work even in the latest version.
So the new features that we've implemented will be available in an upcoming TTCWare release that we're scheduled to release on March 31st of this year. There will be two editions of TTCWare in this release - the first is a version that uses the current user interface which we're calling TTCWare Classic, and the second is a public beta of our new and improved user interface which we're calling TTCWare New. We'd like to encourage all of our users to try out the public beta of the new user interface and provide feedback to Curtiss-Wright so that we know what you like and what you don't like and so we continue to make it better.
One of the first things we did when we decided to improve TTCWare was we took a look at the main user interface and the user interface was based on a menu bar and toolbar and we decided to adopt a more modern Windows approach to using a ribbon interface instead. The ribbon has several advantages over the traditional toolbar and menu bar. Everything is organized in the same spot, you don't have to look for items - you know that they'll be on the ribbon and everything's labeled.
Previously on the toolbar items were not labeled. And then for functions that we had on the toolbar previously we decided to use the same icon to make it easier for existing users to switch over so that if you're used to clicking a particular icon for one of the functions it still has the same icon. Ribbon has six main categories that we've divided all the functions in TTCWare into. The first is the file menu. The file menu is used for general project operations like opening projects, creating new projects, cloning projects, things like that. There's a list of the four most recently used projects and you can also use this menu for accessing the software's preferences as well as looking at the projects folder or its logs. The next tab is the home tab. This has all the major screens in TTCWare - the ones that you use for your primary functions like network topology, format generation, compiling project.
Also has the report generator and the xml exporter. Finally, we added a new button that lets you switch back and forth between the classic version and the new version of TTCWare. So you can see in the screenshot you just click the switch to the TTCWare Classic button and that would open up the classic version and vice versa. The live data tab is for interacting with hardware. So this has all of your functions like data display strip chart, inventory, terminal, things like that. Next we have the batch operations tab.
This contains all of the utilities that accelerate the operation of TTCWare, so these are things like importers and exporters for bringing large amounts of information into the software. We also have our copy box and copy card functions here so if you want to copy an existing card within your project or from an external project into a project you can do that here. And this also is where the excel wizard is located. The excel wizard is a very powerful tool that we've developed over the past couple of years to import and export configurations for many different types of cards.
Next we have the applications tab. The applications tab is for launching all the support applications that are part of the TTCWare software suite. These include things like the media manager, the file converter and file verify utility. Putting all the applications here you can use TTCWare as a hub of all of your applications and kind of the launch pad to start using all these different tools. Finally we have the help tab. This is where you can get your get help from whatever you're looking at - it's context sensitive and it shows you the help for whatever the current tool is.
The next function I want to talk about is our search feature. We've enhanced the search feature in TTCWare to make it always available and easier to use. So on the right side of the screen there's a box that's labeled 'search project', you just double-click on that and then you type in what you want to find. You can search by the name or type of a card, a box, a parameter. You can also search by IP address and just simply double-click on an object to find, to navigate to a setup screen. One of the new features that we've enhanced in TTCWare is the project search feature.
The search feature is accessed by clicking the search project box that's on the right side of the screen which is always visible and that will pop up a window where you can type in what you want to find. You can search by the name or type of a box, card, parameter or recorder rule. You can also search by IP address and once you've found the items of interest you simply double-click them to navigate to their setup screen. And this is available anytime, anywhere in the application so you can always find things. The next area we chose to improve is the network topology screen.
The network topology screen is the main navigation screen in TTCWare. It's used for adding, moving, managing and deleting devices and cards. So when we originally created TTCWare each box or device had its own navigation screen and when you would go to a child box you would actually go to a separate screen to manage it and this was a very difficult to use interface and we replaced it several years ago with a tree that showed all the devices and cards in a single hierarchical structure. But we've had some customer feedback that told us that in a large system it was relatively easy to get lost in this large tree. So we decided to solve this problem by splitting the tree structure into two parts.
On the left side of the screen we now have a list of just the devices, so you have all your DAUs, your switches, recorders and other boxes. Then when you select a DAU, the right side of the screen shows the cards that are in that DAU and this allows you to see your whole network topology much easier while still accessing cards on an individual DAU and you don't get lost anywhere near as easily as you could previously. So here's an example of this. In this example we have 21 network devices shown on the left side and you see there's no need to scroll, they're all listed there and we've selected our MnACQ-2600 and on the right side we can see we have 25 of the slots listed and we can see all those and we don't have to scroll at all except to get the last couple slots in the MnACQ. So we get a lot more information on the screen at the same time which definitely helps improve, you know, the ability to understand where everything is.
We also doubled the control buttons. So each side of the screen, both the left and the right, have control buttons that are context sensitive so if you select an empty slot on the box side of the screen you would be able to add a new device. If you select an empty slot on the card side you'd be able to add a new part and the buttons reflect whatever's selected so as you select a different device, the buttons will change to be the appropriate configuration. We also have separate property panels for each device that you've selected and car that you selected. And finally at the very bottom you'll see the power calculator display so that shows the power usage - that's an estimate for the selected box and the type of card.
The next thing we decided to do was to incorporate the parameter manager functionality into TTCWare. The parameter manager is used for configuring EU calculations, concatenations and derived parameters. This is a function that previously was a separate screen and it's very important for people who want to use TTCWare as the hub of their entire flight test system. So if you want to enter your EU configuration up front while you're setting up your hardware and have it carry forward throughout the whole setup, you know, pre-flight checkout, configuration and processing, this would be the screen where you would do that.
So we incorporated that functionality into the network topology screen as a tab so it's very easy to access. We also retain the ability to have the parameter manager as a pop-up window so that you can use it when you're on a different screen if you want to quickly check an EU or something like that so it gives a lot of flexibility. Another feature that we're adding to the network topology screen that isn't quite ready yet is the advanced visualization. This is something that customers have requested for many years. It basically is the desire to be able to visualize the network graphically so instead of just having a tree of the other network devices you actually have pictures of the devices and that would show how they were connected and you could manipulate them. So you could add, edit, delete and manage them on the screen. This is something that's very useful for making reports as well as presentations about your FTI system. We're targeting this feature for our June 2021 release and you know, once it's there we'll be able to have this feature and we'll be retaining the preview as well so you'll be able to have both worlds - won't be limited to just the visualization or just the preview.
Next feature I want to talk about is the property panels. So the property panels have been part of TTCWare over the last couple of years. This is basically a context-sensitive location where you can quickly change settings on devices or cards. One of the things you can change here that's very important is the device name. You can also change the IP address One of the things we added in the most recent in this update for TTCWare is we've added the ability to configure a PCM format size so you can change the number of words and frames into PCM format through the property panel without having to access the card screen. And so this is just a helpful thing to have.
It also lets you quickly look at the settings but if you don't want to change, if you just want to view what they're currently set to, you can quickly do that without even having to open the setup screen. It's just another tool to help accelerate operating TTCWare. Next on the PCM format generation screen we decided to make several improvements here involving how we display information. We believe that our format generation screen is the industry's most powerful screen and we didn't want to change any of the basic functionality because it is very powerful and useful but we wanted to add a new area to show more information about the parameter that you are currently working with.
So we took several of the boxes where we previously just showed sampling rate and periodicity and we enhanced it to show a lot more information. So one of the new things we have is what we call the summary text. The summary text shows you a quick summary of what the parameter is sampling. So in this example you can see it's sampling channel one on that, on the MSCD-108D-1 card. We also added, as we see here, the type of the card and the card's name and then for SCD cards we decided to go even further and show the type of the filter - in this case FIR 120 Taps, the sampling mode, which is sequential, and we added the ability to switch from sequential to simultaneous and back and forth directly on the format generation screen - common customer request.
And then we also have the cutoff frequency and the filter delay. So these are very useful pieces of information that were either very difficult to find previously or were not shown at all. So this really gives the end user a lot more power to understand what their actual sensor will do when they collect the data in their PCM format. Next, one of the major focuses we did during our modernization project is to take a look at our card configuration screens.
There are quite a lot of card configuration screens in TTCWare, several hundred of them in fact and we decided to take a look at how they worked and how they looked. And one of the things we discovered is that many of the screens had very inconsistent visual styles and were sometimes difficult to use and they were also designed with much lower monitor resolutions in mind.
Some of them were designed even for 640 by 480 monitors so the end result, when you looked at it on a modern 1080p display is all the content was crammed into the upper left corner. So we decided to fix this by redesigning the screens to put all the settings into an easy to use grid that would take up the whole screen and show much more information and controls at the same time. So let's look at some examples. Our first example is the MTCD-208B-1 module. This is an 8-channel thermocouple module for our platforms. On the left we have the old version of the screen, which everything was clearly labeled and it was well organized but it only showed the information about one channel at a time. So if you wanted to get a big picture view of all the channels you really couldn't. In the new version on the right side you can see that we've put the eight channels into a grid.
Everything is still clearly labeled but you can see the settings for all the channels at the same time and you can easily set them to the same value or adjust them as needed and it's much easier to work with just a keyboard instead of needing a mouse and a keyboard. Another example is the MSCD-108D-1 module. This is a channel signal conditioning card that's very popular for the MCDAU and MnACQ platforms. One of the things we did on this and the original version of this stream was that each of the different areas of settings, from excitation voltage to gain to over sampling, were their own tab and within that tab you could configure all eight channels but you still couldn't get a big picture view of what all the settings were for a single channel without having to generate a report or something like that.
So the new version, we decided to fix that so there are no more tabs - everything's on the same screen and you can see it's still broken up into subsections. We have a section for excitation, a section for gaming, for filter but all settings are there and you can see all the channels at the same time so it's much easier to manipulate setup and see how things are going. We also added several new pieces of information that were not previously there such as the sampling rate and the actual cutoff frequency and filter delay. This is useful information for when setting up this card - it wasn't previously shown.
The other thing we did on this screen that's really important - we changed the way that gain is entered. So you can still enter the total gain like you always would have by either typing in a total gain or selecting the primary and secondary gains but you can also enter the min and max input mode, input voltage now and this will automatically choose the gain that matches the input range you specify and this is a much more powerful way of setting the gain then because it's easier to read it from a data sheet or sensor that tells you you have a sensor that needs plus or minus one volt. You can just type minus one volt and plus one volt and then you're done you don't have to figure out what gain is necessary to do that range.
Next we'll take a look at a use case on the MSCD-108D-1 module.
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