We describe a real-time, component-based system for an inspection application. We chose the inspection application and the accompanying task (or scenario) so that we might fully exercise and test our theories about real-time complex systems, system architectures, design methodologies, and software tools. We will describe the application, give a history and description of our system architecture and design methodology, describe the real-time software tools we used, and conclude with a discussion of real-time and object-oriented challenges solved. 1 The Inspection Application Our inspection workstation consists of a coordinate measuring machine (CMM), an analog 3D contact probe, a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera with frame grabber, and control computers. The CMM is Cartesian (i.e., axis motion and axis position sensing are along the three orthogonal axes). The contact probe and camera are mounted on the CMM arm. The software controller sends velocity commands to each of the three axi...