- Latest release of IADS Software Suite adds support for TmNS, TSPI, Nichols plots, and IRIG-106 Chapter 8 and features enhanced video processing capabilities
Ashburn, Va. 26 September 2023 . Curtiss-Wright’s Defense Solutions division has announced the latest version of its industry-leading IADS real-time and post-test display and analysis software suite for flight test programs. IADS version 9.2.6 adds a wide range of new features and enhancements that increase the flexibility and productivity of flight test programs while improving the flight test engineer’s user experience.
Telemetry Network Standard Data Support
The newly released version of IADS expands support for additional flight test data type standards. Responding to customer demand, IADS now supports the Telemetry Network Standard (TmNS). Released in IRIG-106-19, TmNS is a bidirectional, Ethernet telemetry protocol. Curtiss-Wright flight test instrumentation (FTI) product family includes numerous I/O modules that support output of TmNS data, and the enhanced IADS software suite now enables that data to be displayed for analysis.
Time-Space Position Information Data Support
The Time-Space Position Information (TSPI) data format enables real-time telemetering via Ethernet and/or Chapter 4 PCM (clock and data). Curtiss-Wright has added support for TSPI encoded data to IADS, including all standard TSPI features, such as moving map, artificial horizon, etc. This enables the software suite to output TSPI positional and orientation data output from products, such as the MiTSPI nTTU-2600 Miniature Network TSPI data acquisition stack.
Nichols Plot Display Support
Designed from the ground up for use in aerospace flight test programs, IADS, running on a typical PC environment, enables users to flexibly configure their window view, providing display (or widget) options within the main window to flexibly present data of interest. Adding to its wide support for displaying and analyzing data, including FFTs and power spectral density plots, IADS now supports the display of Nichols plots. These plots allow flight test engineers to chart the gain versus phase for an open-loop response. The addition of Nichols plot graphing further enhances the flexibility, ease of use and ease of configuration of IADS, enabling flight test engineers to set up their test and analysis environment to meet their program’s specific application requirements.
IADS supports hundreds of data display options, including strip charts, FFTs, cross-plots, moving maps, artificial horizon and various types of airplane style gauges (for altitude/speed, etc).
Updated Video Data Support
One of the powerful and popular features of IADS is its Scrollback function. Scrollback enables the user to, at any point, pause the live data and go backwards to an earlier point in time during the flight test. In IADS, all data is time-stamped from the same time base, and distributed throughout the flight data acquisition system, so all devices are synchronized. When Scrollback is used, all data and displays, including video, are updated at the same time, to display data from the exact same moment. For the latest version of IADS, Curtiss-Wright has completely re-written the software’s suites video processing portion. This rewrite greatly increases the variety of video data types that can be played by IADS and improves the synchronization between the video data and the rest of the flight test data.
IRIG-106 Chapter 8 Support
Curtiss-Wright has also added support for IRIG-106 Chapter 8, which is supported by many Curtiss-Wright MIL-STD-1553 bus encoder products, to the latest version of IADS. This provides an example of Curtiss-Wright’s commitment to optimizing interoperability across its entire FTI system solution product family.
