In 1999 I joined Schaffner Chase EMC Systems Ltd (now Schaffner EMC Systems Ltd) software development department to start working on two new software applications aimed at EMC test labs worldwide. The new applications were EMC Compliance3 Emission and EMC Compliance3 Immunity. The applications were to replace the former 16 bit applications CES9945 and CIS9942 and to move Schaffner's software to the more modern Windows operating systems.
I was tasked with designing and coding EMC Compliance3 Immunity, the replacement to CIS9942. Starting from a fresh slate, Compliance3 Immunity was designed to be as flexible as possible, breaking away from the ridged limitations of its predecessor. The result of this was an EMC application that would run on all modern Windows platforms, which was configurable by the operator to perform EMC testing to world-wide standards (commercial, automotive and military) and capable of monitoring an EUT whilst performing these tests. In late 2001, after 18 months of solid coding, EMC Compliance3 Immunity was released to an international market. Since the initial release, Compliance3 Immunity was been further enhanced, keeping it up to date with new standards and increasing customer requirements.
EMC Compliance3 Immunity was developed using Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0. The majority of the code was written in Visual Basic 6.0, although a number of supporting DLL's for time critical, graphical rendering and low level control of instruments, were written in Visual C++. The applications are component based, allowing re-usable code between the two applications and any future applications. In total 2, software development engineers were responsible for the EMC Compliance3 applications (one for each product).
To date (well until I left in 2005), EMC Compliance3 Immunity has approximately 300,000 lines of software code written over a 3 year period, that’s almost 400 lines of code per day. This doesn’t include the additional documentation that goes into on-line help which is written in windows note pad as HTML (in the same manner as this website is produced).
All of the graphics in Compliance3 Immunity were created using Paint- Shop pro-7 and the Microsoft Visual Studto 6 tools (for icons). The majority of the images were created by the programmers and some additional images, including the Compliance3 Logo’s were created on Mac’s by Schaffners graphical designer.
The EMC Compliance3 software is packaged and distributed using the industry standard Install Shield software. The Compliance3 Immunity installation comprised of a single Setup.exe of around 30 MB which can be download from Schaffner’s website.