New Hardware interface to synchronize stand-alone measurement instruments

The Measurement Instruments (MIs) connected by Hardware Interface (HI) to the node of the Distributed Measurement System (DMS) can coordinate their operations by synchronized trigger signals sent from the HIs to MIs. In the research it is taken into consideration the case that the HIs cannot be connected to DMS and, then, the MIs are standalone. With this aim a new architecture of HI is proposed for the synchronous triggering of the MI. The proposed architecture avoids the random effects of concurrency of the software processes running on PC, and reduces the random causes of delay to detect the trigger condition. From the analysis of the HI the model of the synchronization time delay is pointed out, including the opening time of the hardware components. This model permits to evaluate the effects of each cause affecting the execution of the trigger command.