The following case study was formed:
Certain ESD (Electrostatic discharge) PPE (personal protection equipment) needs to be tested for certification purposes.
The measurement is performed by placing the object under test in a climate chamber, on a conducting surface, and connecting the probe.
Both conducting surface and the probe are connected to the meter.
The measurement procedure are a number of consecutive measurements, where the device needs to charge before each measurement and discharge after.
The problem is that the measurement equipment, IET Labs 1865+ Megaohmmeter in this case, needs babysitting before and during the measurement.
All the measurement parameters need to be set beforehand. Often several pieces of the PPE need to be tested, and a limitted number of pieces fits into the climate chamber. It takes about ohe hour for the climate chamber to achieve the required parameters.
This creates failure point no. 1 (different startup configuration between the measurement sessions).
During the measurement session (a series of consecutive measurements) the operator needs to initiate the measurement, wait for the charging to complete, note down the measurement result, file it in the report form and initiate subsequent measurement.
Here are the failure point no. 2 (noting the results down and transferring to the report form is prone to human errors) and no. 3 (initiating the measurements at specified time intervals).
IET Labs 1865+ Megaohmmeter allows interaction o.a. by means of SCPI (Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments). This means that all the manual steps can be automated.
The operator is either not capable or does not have the intention of maintaining advanced scripting system (e.g. Python). They don't want to be involved in the low-level communication aspect of the system.
They are however tech savvy, can read and understand the SCPI commandset, and they can prepare a set of commands, provided they have a mean of sending them to the equipment in the controlled manner and reading the measurement results back.
A GUI program (C#/AvaloniaUI) was perpared that allows:
- bidirectional communication with the IET Labs 1865+ Megaohmmeter through COM port (fixed initialisation parameters, suitable for this device only)
- defining a script with set of SCPI commands as Setup, Loop, and Teardown segments, where the number of Loop execution is settable
- storing and reading back the prepared commands sets
- running the command set
- reading back the data sent from the measurement equipment and transferring it to external destination by means of system clipboard
User manual (Instructions for use) can be found in the Manual file.
The software was made for this specific case study, though it is possible to exted it in the future (until it reads email, Zawinski's Law), depending on requests.
It is provided as is (MIT license), without any warranty, and me, the author, can not be made liable for the usage of any kind.
Source code is available on GitHub, enjoy.
Official releases (executables) are not planned as for now (14 July 2026). Contact me if you need an executable. Same if you would like to request specific features.