Maintaining your Sensor Interfaces
The main purpose of CFE is to configure and maintain the collection of sensor interfaces and data streams that ACQ and other SCS components read, store, analyze and display.
Each Sensor Interface is grouped into the type of Physical Device associated (Installed) with it.
If you have not associated the interface with an actual sensor then it will be automatically placed in the Not Installed tree node.
Expanding any category of Physical Device will display all Sensor Interfaces providing data from those devices.
Expanding any Sensor Interface will display all Message Definitions being provided over that interface.
Expanding any Message Definition will display all the Data Fields defined inside that definition.
The above hierarchy is defined in more detail in the background portion of this section of help.
Creating Interfaces
To add a new Sensor Interface you can click the Sensor Interface link under the Add New Item dropdown in the main toolbar, or simply right click on the Sensor Interfaces tree node and choose Create Sensor Interface.
As with other items in CFE a base set of information is required before the object can be created.
For Sensor Interfaces you must supply the type, a display name and, depending on which type you select, you may have a few more data items to fill out to further define your interface before proceeding.
Once you have supplied the basics above CFE will automatically add your new item to the appropriate place in the tree and select it for further editing. The detailed pane will now contain a new and mostly empty form. Fill out the remaining information the best that you can, any required fields will be highlighted for you. Don't forget to Save your changes!
Editing
As with other CFE items, a Sensor Interface details pane has two tabs, a Basic and an Advanced. Depending on which type of interface you are editing you will have a different set of items to edit. Please consult the help page matching the selected interface type for more information.
Removing
To remove a Sensor Interface simply right click on it in the tree list and choose the Delete option.
Additional Operations / Context Menu
Right clicking in the Sensor Interfaces on a category or Sensor Interface also presents a variety of operations you can execute. Some are only relevant if conditions are met (eg you cannot paste if you have not yet copied something), most are self explanatory.
You can build out the Message Definitions for the interface.
You can delete, copy or paste entire interfaces
You can immediately go to the physical device (if any) currently providing the data through this interface.