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Description of Driving Event:

I was involved in a project in which we were developing a new control and data acquisition system for an instrument to be used to measure radiation absorption in clouds. The instrument was being refitted with electronic hardware that was to be controlled by software I was developing with a peer. Only problem was that the hardware was not ready for 3 months while we were supposed to be developing the software. And the project was on a very tight deadline. What we were able to do was create a software simulator to test and validate many of the features of how our software was supposed to work. Of course, this cannot truly be substituted for the hardware but it can get you 50% or more of the way there (depending on the particular project). This allowed us to complete the project on schedule. Additionally, the simulator drove us to create a truly standalone simulator to be able to demonstrate to others how the instrument and interface will work together.