GAMbUSIA — a general purpose metalanguage for instruments with serial interface

Monitoring system designed for biological and marine environment observation are equipped with different types of sensors related to different disciplines. For each sensor integrated in the system it is necessary to develop a driver (software/firmware) specific to its operation. This kind of approach limits the system flexibility because the addition of a new sensor involves the update of the entire software control. For this reason it is important to reduce the time and simplify the work required to integrate new sensors. This paper present GAMbUSIA (GenerAl purpose Metalanguage for instruments with Serial InterfAce) wich aim to improve code reuse and system flexibility. GAMbUSIA is a metalanguage, based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML), with which it is possible to describe the communication protocol at a high level and use (and reuse) this description instead to develop an ad-hoc driver. In order to evaluate the proposed solution, Gambusia is used to create an oceanographic sensor description in a data acquisition system.